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Looking for Other Routes

Carol Smallwood
Excerpt from Lily’s Odyssey published with permission by All Things That Matter Press

    On the way to a dental appointment to stave off seeing strays, I recited one of Aunt Ida’s holy card verses: “The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord shine His face upon you” and since I’d forgotten the rest of it I continued with: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” picturing the church-converted-hospital scene in Gone With The Wind before the huge stained glass window shatters when Atlanta is invaded. I pictured Aunt Ida saying her rosary, the worn pearl beads rattling like bones against wooden pews made of trees once with green leaves or needles.
    When waiting in the dentist’s waiting room, I noticed a request in a magazine to take part in a study about child incest survivors. The two other women there were discussing how cleverly Julia Roberts had faked her death to escape an abusive husband in Sleeping with the Enemy. Covers of magazines read: “Be His Very Best in Bed,” “What Men Won’t Tell You.” I recognized the toothpaste advertised on television by a woman in a desert using the last of her water to brush her teeth. After she collapses, the sparkles radiating from her smile attracts the attention of a Tom Cruise look alike overhead. The magazines there were the kinds that women pored because they had models whom never aged—they were constantly being replaced with younger ones representing “today’s look.”
    For weeks I thought about participating in the incest survivor survey. My family was the only one I’d ever have and wasn’t the illusion of a good one as necessary as breathing? Yet shouldn’t what happens when it becomes twisted be told to stop churning out women like me? But wasn’t it human nature—men are stronger than women are and the strong have ruled the weak from the beginning of time. And doesn’t the Bible admonish wives to obey their husbands and honor their fathers? But wasn’t there a wider truth that’s corroded by silence?
    Muriel Rukeyser might have written that if a woman told the truth about her life “the world would split open,” but I feared I’d hear: “So what? Abuse’s as common as chicken pox, and like the poor will always be with us. You think you can fix the world? Think again, lady.” Still, even if this was so, why not do myself a favor and get rid of the burden of carrying it around? But wouldn’t I always—so what difference would it make?
    Aunt Ida’s priest saying, “Accept things the way they are because it’s God’s will,” often came back to me; at times I thought it was solid wisdom, other times the easy way out even though I’ve come across the same idea in other major religions and Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man ended with, “Whatever is, is right.” Did the old women in Aunt Ida’s church still recite rosaries hoping it’d be the one that’d tip the scales for them?
    Still, how would I know if I didn’t tell? But wouldn’t I be a snitch, one speaking ill of the dead in the bargain? And if no one cared, wouldn’t that make it worse when I lost my illusion of how things would change when I did? What if no one would have anything to do with me?
    And yet, if I didn’t face it, symptoms would continue because they were attempts to get things right—to rescue and thereby feel rescued—to make sure plants had enough room and water to grow so I did.
    I read that a little more than one out of ten women in the United States will get post-traumatic stress disorder. But when I got enough courage to ask a physician when I had a physical if it could be what I had, he told me it was what soldiers got—predisposed soldiers because not all returned traumatized.
    How much should I tell Mark and Jenny? If they knew wouldn’t it ruin the memory of their father and my adoptive father? Wouldn’t I be angry with them for not taking my side, feel guilty if they did?
    But I had a 99.99% certainty that I had post-traumatic stress disorder: it was like finding a hidden picture in one of those children’s puzzles—once you knew where it was, you couldn’t believe you hadn’t spotted it right off. To borrow Betty Friedan’s phrase “the problem that has no name” now had one. I still didn’t accept it all the time because it turned things upside down more than if I’d lived during the time the Copernican Theory became known. But the knowledge that anyone could get it gave me assurance that I hadn’t started out “half-baked.”
    In the meantime, I continue to be grateful for Rite Aid greeting cards: new occasions continue to be added even though the parents of girl babies still receive pink cards with “sugar and spice and everything nice”, and boy babies illustrations of toy soldiers with blue drums.
    I walk Rite Aid greeting card aisles often when the White Rapids Humane Society I helped start gets too frustrating—times when I thought I’d do as much good cutting out pictures of cats and dogs from magazines. When getting in my car, I talk to myself like I talk to Kitty: “You’re a F-I—N-E girl. Yes, you are. You’re a pret—ty girl. Yes, a pret—ty, pret—ty girl. Aren’t you a pret—ty, pret—ty girl? Yes, yes, you are. My! You ARE a handsome little thing you sw—wee—ty delight. You’re a F-I-N-E girl” And sometimes I liked the way “Sufficient onto the day the evil thereof” rolled off my tongue.
    Whenever Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is on TV, I can’t watch it because the snakes trigger the dream of being with Uncle Walt in a dim basement with snakes writhing in and out of me when I was about five. It’s the dream Doctor said “had everything in a nutshell.” I feel his hair tumbling on my face and he uses his pet name for me: “Dolly, this is our secret. If you tell you won’t be my girl anymore.” I concentrate on a narrow shaft of light from a small window, but the more I struggle the more the words suffocate in my throat. I scream so loud that the dust particles in the narrow shaft of light explode; we turn into butterflies and escape through the window.
    Because the book reveals so much, when I put the book down my walk is unsteady as if a dentist had exposed nerves to reach deep decay. I walk away surprised that the floor supports me, not unlike when my first grade nun at St. John’s told my class that if we talked the cracks in the worn wooden floor would separate and we’d fall into the fires of Hell.
    I keep Trauma and Recovery out where I can see it and touch it, proof that my problem without a name now has one.
    When obsessions hit me upon awaking I remember the thickness of the pages, the weight of the book on my lap, the feel of the thick yellow marker in my hand with only a few remaining faint black letters. I have a later edition of Trauma and Recovery in paperback but the hardcover feels more secure. It probably is the security Caroline felt from her worn Bible, the security Aunt Ida hoped I’d have in her authorized Catholic version. The yellow marker’s always by Kitty’s brush and I like the sound it makes capturing words like Virginia Woolf’s: “...the public and private worlds are inseparably connected; that the tyrannies and servilities of one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.”
    Yes, the places in White Rapids look different from Nicolet City, so fear should elude me like grease on Teflon. Regretfully I can’t say anymore, “Things will be different when I’m out of Nicolet City.”
    Still, there must be other routes I haven’t explored and I’d just kept looking.

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