Free Sex Object by Jessica Valenti

old with a man who was taking too many drugs and seemed to be suffering from a mental illness to boot. He was my father’s friend. He sounded bad on the phone, my father said, and so they came home to visit and check on him. When my dad walked into the house, one of the children had an odd look on his face and said something about Daddy being in the basement. When my father walked down the stairs, he found his friend, his brother-in-law, hanging there. He doesn’t talk about what he looked like.
    And so he and my mother stayed in Queens, to help with the children, who were all under seven years old at the time.
    They stayed even as my cousins grew up and my family started to move to Westchester to get out of the neighborhood. Instead of leaving the city, my parents bought the foundation of a house in Woodstock, in upstate New York, from a man who couldn’t continue building it. He had broken his back trying to take down one of the barns on the property; there were two of them, both over a hundred years old. The man made the mistake of disassembling the structure while still inside. It crashed down around and on top of him and so he sold the house as it was, with a set of blueprints that my parents spread out often on our table in Queens.
    We started driving up every weekend, every summer, for years until my parents finished building their house. My father did the plumbing, my mom the wiring. They had a friend, an artist, collect rocks from Esopus Creek nearby and build a beautiful if a bit off-kilter fireplace. My sister and I would pee outside, help to carry the wood planks for the upstairs floor, and climb up a ladder—before we had a staircase—to our bedrooms, which were right next to each other.
    After a few summers it was done, but thirty years later you can still see the remnants of my parents’ mistakes. The light switches are a bit too low and in strange places. You get hot water by turning the spigot to the right, not the left. Sound carries everywhere. There is no room where your voice won’t be heard.
    My father wanted desperately for me to succeed and I wanted desperately to please him, to be the shining example, the proof, of how far he had come. When I did something right,something good and smart and worthy, his praise was effusive, all-encompassing. Mistakes, though, were never simply screw-ups. Any failure was a sure sign of an inevitable downward spiral. Doing badly on an exam was not just one test grade but evidence of a slippery slope down to where he and my mother felt they resided. The consequences of my not succeeding were ripe to him in a way that I could not understand.
    So when I nearly failed an economics class my junior year of high school, he started screaming soon after he saw the report card. He brought me out to our backyard and pointed to a large, empty black pot that had once held a small tree inside of our house.
    He told me to pick it up and when I said it was too heavy he got close to my face and screamed that if I did not pick up this plant pot, if I did not hold it in my arms, he would beat the shit out of me. And so I picked it up.
    Don’t you dare fucking drop it , he said. And so I didn’t.
    I stood there, shifting the weight of the pot from one arm and a lifted knee to the other, sweating and crying.
    Our yard—two hundred fifty square feet of uneven concrete—doubled as a parking space after my parents poured cement on the curb to make a ramp and built swinging gates that opened up to the street. It was a not-so-legal last resort to stop our car tires from being stolen and the windows smashed. For a while before that we had a car that my parents bought for $110 because they figured if it got stolen it was no big deal. It got stolen.
    A cherry tree grew out of the lone space of dirt at the cracked intersections of concrete. My parents had planted it when I was a toddler, not expecting much, but it just kept growing—its branches reached