Men, Women, and Children
by Terah Van Dusen There is no synonym for pedophile. I couldn’t call him Grandpa like everybody else did. I couldn’t call him Great Grandpa, which was his relation to me. I couldn’t call him Wayne either, perhaps the ugliest name one could imagine. And I could hardly believe when my own mother named my brother that. But my mother had no real bearing on my life—she was in and out of it—so when she named her third child Wayne Cloud, well it was just another sad little stone I swallowed. Some ironic little twist that nobody understood but me. Nothing new really. Great Grandpa Wayne took my sense of family from me, my childhood innocence no doubt, and my trust in other people—mainly men. He took it from me and I live with that every day of my life. Most people in my life wish I didn’t. They don’t wish he didn’t, they wish I didn’t. They wish I’d have dealt with that already, likely so they wouldn’t have to butt up against it—this very ugly thing. They wished I’d already have packaged that nonsense away in a box with a neat little bow labeled done and dealt with. What they don’t realize is that it’s still mine and will always be there. I still own that pain, no matter how neatly it’s packaged. It will never go far from me, I fear. I can’t ship it away. And trust me, I don’t want it any more than they do. And when I say they, what I mean is my boyfriend, male friends, family members, and society in general. Pretty much anyone who is not equipped to deal with my reality, or can’t—due to lack of experience—empathize with me and other survivors. Sadly, I have found this to be a whole hell of a lot of people. I didn’t tell my own family what Great Grandpa Wayne did to me and how many times he did it until I was 30 (I’m 32 now). And I get the sense that people already want me to rid myself of this thing—this very ugly thing. Is mine uglier than most? In some ways it is, and in some ways it isn’t. (I would know because I’ve been to group therapy.) I fared better than the others, though. There were two other victims that I know of, not including the imaginary friend I dreamed up—a friend who was likely just a symptom of something called dissociative disorder. My imaginary friend’s name was Esther and I met her in the vegetable garden, she peeked out from a row of pumpkins to befriend me. “He does that to me too,” she told me. I just nodded, somehow grateful but also regretful that my family illness had leached into the neighborhood. The other two women were Wayne’s very own daughters, my two great aunts. They had it a lot worse than me from what I’ve heard, and I only know this from my aunts moving their lips in quiet whispers when I was a child. It was clear that this was never to be brought up. Great Grandpa Wayne was the patriarch of our family and we intended to keep him there. I kept quiet, but my ears strained to hear every word the women said. At that point, I wouldn’t dare say what he had done to me—I hardly had any words for it—and I saw how the women he’d abused were perceived as tainted, crazy even. We walked on eggshells around them. His own wife was the craziest of them all! She was in and out of institutions, and if only anyone ever knew why—well maybe then they’d see that he was really the crazy one! But no. Even though it was the 90’s, patriarchy ruled. Big time. “That’s why Jessie has no hair and wears a wig” my aunt Julie told me one day, “She pulled it all out when she was a teenager. Nobody really knows why, but.” People in our family ended sentences with but. We’re not the most educated bunch. We are loggers and farmers and waitresses at Chinese restaurants. But. But. But. My Great Aunt Jessie, Wayne’s oldest daughter, wore a black wig that made her look at times like Elvis and at times like Elizabeth Taylor. She hardly spoke to me growing up. I’d see her in line at the grocery store but she wouldn’t say hi to me. I didn’t blame her though. Maybe she didn’t see me. Maybe she was somewhere else altogether. Jessie, rumor holds, took the brunt of Wayne’s brutality. His very own daughter. Trichotillomania. That’s what they call it when you pull out all your hair. I imagined her doing this on the old front porch of the farm house—white painted peeling on the walls behind her. The smell of hedge plants and fig. Our family was sick and twisted alright. No, scratch that: Great Grandpa Wayne was sick and twisted. Nobody else. Nobody else conspired to gut the family like he did—one girlchild at a time. We were not religious people but if we were one might ask “God, why put so many women in the family? Couldn’t you have produced all boys instead? Were you not watching out for us?” Like I said, we were not religious people, so we never got any real answers. Just sucked it up. Drank. Used drugs. Became depressed. Never left town. And remembered Great Grandpa Wayne fondly, well everyone but me did. We even had a family reunion in his honor. I was twenty one years old at the time. I’m surprised I even went but I did. I drank the whole time and I’m not even a drinker. Jessie, the one with trichotillomania, showed up wearing a bright red hooded sweatshirt. I was wearing an identical one and I couldn’t help but wonder what all that meant: me and Jessie dressed identically, inside and out. Nobody noticing but me. More of the same. Everybody talking about Great Grandpa Wayne but none of them talking about what he was really like—just skirting the issue, burying it. He still ruled, it seemed—even when he’d been dead for over a decade. Just this Christmas, a few short days ago, Dad was going on and on about Great Grandpa Wayne. “Grandpa Wayne didn’t wear eye glasses but he used a magnified glass to read. He was into rocks you know, geology. I guess that’s why he had the magnified glass.” I nodded from my perch at the dining room table, going red inside from fury. Being a good girl and keeping my mouth shut—it wasn’t the answer I knew, but it was what I was conditioned to do. Plus I wasn’t in the mood to bring “it” up. I was however plain flabbergasted that even after I told Dad what I did two years ago, parked in front of the farm house crying, he would still bring up Great Grandpa Wayne fondly. I vowed to let it out on paper, later, and I cleared the plates from the table and took them to the sink. I let the warm faucet water pour over my hands and my mind, I bookmarked the conversation with Dad for a later time. I just didn’t have the energy to beg for understanding that night. From my partner, from my father, on that first Christmas Eve with my newborn daughter. In the coming years, I hoped, the men might read what I had written. It was only in their understanding, I knew, that the world would ever change for the better. In the meantime I would healthfully shelter my daughter, to the likes that was never done for me. Her vigilant protector I would be, in a world that feels full of indifference. I would write their names out loud. Jessie. Bobbie. Faith. Esther. Terah. I would cross his out for good measure. |
Terah Van Dusen is a poet and aspiring memoirist near Eugene, Oregon. Her personal essays have been published by The Manifest-Station, THRU Mag and Cool Waters Media. Terah is writing a memoir about her childhood off-the-grid in Northern California. You can read her work here or visit her on IG @terahvandusen.
|