Free Dropped Threads 2 by Carol Shields Page B

okay.
    YOU FUCKING MOVED.
    He never left.
    Pretending to walk away, he walked on the spot. Pretending to leave my room, he slammed the door shut from that spot, all the while standing there quietly watching me, watching. I did not move. He knows it. I know it. We both know I did it right I did it right , what he said. But it’s not okay. I did it right and it’s not okay.
    He punishes me for doing it right.
    There is not much more I can tell you about that night. Hiding is the only one who could tell you what happened next, but she won’t. She still won’t even tell me. But I know it was bad and I know he did it again and again and again and again and I know I gave up. He broke me with this one. Because it was clear to me that no matter how right I did anything from now on, it would make no difference to the outcome. No difference . He broke my spirit when he robbed me of that belief.
    The occurrence of frequent and often violent Blacks seemed to be the only thing I could believe in during those years that followed—going to bars armed with a knife being only one of the horrors of that time. It was the daily rituals that I believe did the most damage. Normal things that terrified me but I made myself do. The front door of the theatre school I was studying at was directly opposite the window of the room where it happened. Every day I made myself walk past that window. For three years. I never used the rear entrance. Never. See, it’s no big deal . After graduating, I moved to Toronto and lived alone. But I don’t want to . And to bear being touched by the man I loved during those years, I would split off—watching myself “act out” from a corner of the room. It hurts. They were endless, those little tortures. But I think I did them because I needed to live as if life from before still belonged to me.
    I was invited to perform in a play the role of Artemesia, a visual artist who as a young girl in 1612 was raped by her teacher. For three months, six performances a week, I would tell her story. There would be a rape scene, of course, but I would be acting it . People were finally going to listen to her; three hundred people a night were going to listen. And they did.
    Until the night the play closed, and they stopped listening. It was as if she didn’t matter any more, as if it had never happened, as if she … were garbage . I wanted to die.
    I nearly did.
    I woke up one morning to find myself unable to move. Paralyzed. Incontinent. As if my body had simply quit. I had no choice but to be admitted to an in-patient care facility for women who had suffered from the same kind of tortures that I had. There they gave me a name for what was happening to me: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It was a syndrome and it was real. It had a name . Even from that half-dead place, I felt grateful. So grateful. I stayed there for a long time. It had taken seven years to get there. A long time I stayed in that place, and finally I went home. That’s when we found Jule.
    And I found myself in hell.
    With Hiding.
    And with us in hell was anybody who loved me anybody who loved stupidstupidstupidgirl. They were not allowed any reason to love, have faith in or hope for her. My mother watched me disappear a little more each day: retreating into my childhood bedroom, physically and emotionally becoming increasingly, terrifyingly, dependent. She didn’t know if she would ever see me live as an adult again. I resented my father’s innocence. I had always loved that about him—protected it. But at his slightest encouragement, I would remind him that I had lost what he could afford to have—not having had it robbed of him. Though I was wrong—so wrong about that—he said nothing. My parents would listen, just listen to me, trying to see and feel the horror, so that at least this time , I would not have to be in it alone. I could not bear to see my brother’s grief—so I looked away from it. My family of friends I rejected—pushing them