UNSPEAKABLE by Sara Eliza Johnson
Having observed that the most suspenseful part of a horror story is before, not after, the horror appears, I was struck one day by the thought . . . that a fetus could be an effective horror if the reader knew it was growing into something malignly different from the baby expected. Nine whole months of anticipation, with the horror inside the heroine!
–Ira Levin, author of Rosemary’s Baby
As an only child in the ’90s who spent many lonely hours channel-surfing, who watched many R‑rated films in secret by herself, I first viewed Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby alone in my bedroom, on the tiny white television my parents had given me for my birthday. Even then, before I understood the brutality and ubiquity of sexual violence – before I’d experienced any sexual violence myself, and much longer before I’d confronted that truth and its trauma – I sat mesmerized by the exquisite beauty and understated terror of the dream sequence that signifies Rosemary’s rape. I could not look away.
In the beginning of this scene, a perfect one by any cinematic standard, Rosemary sways like a buoy in rough waters, falls deep into her husband’s arms. She’d planned to make a baby after their romantic dinner, but now she’s so dizzy, so tired. She lies on her bed in flowing red pajamas, the blue ocean miraculously appearing all around her. Blue, blue water like the mantle that frames the Virgin Mary’s head. Deep red cloth, like her miracle baby’s skin at birth, before he takes his first mortal breath, and red like her child’s wounds will be at his death.
Rosemary sits on a boat, drinking a glass of whiskey at the posh party. Why are you taking them off? she asks dreamily as her husband removes her clothes. To make you more comfortable, he replies. Now she’s naked in the sun, in front of everyone. She covers her breasts with her hands and shivers.
Sleep, Ro.
Rosemary ascends to the ceiling of her bedroom, her sun-yellow wallpaper transforming into the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel.
You’ve got her too high, she hears her husband say, but he’s not here anymore. No one is. There’s only Rosemary and the deckhand on the boat, a storm swirling ahead of them.
You better go down below, miss.
Down in the hold, many people wait for her, their faces obscured with shadows cast by fire. They surround the bed. Someone paints a symbol on her stomach with blood as men in white tie her legs to the posts.
You’d better have your legs tied down in case of convulsions.
Rosemary, wake up.
Am I forgiven, Father?
Open your eyes.
This is no dream.
* * *
In my own dream, I’m walking through a verdant jungle with a faceless man. The sun is low and humid; shadows at our feet writhe, as if electrocuted by an invisible wind. A colossal python slithers past us and consumes a caterpillar the size of a person. I am scared, but I am also not scared. I casually reach up to pull at the leaves of a tree, as a child does. They sting my hand, and I cry out to my companion, who ignores me.
Later, riding home in the van, I find tweezers in my purse and begin extracting what I assume to be prickers. But there’s something odd about them. The prickers writhe beneath my skin, as the snake and the shadows had through the tropical ferns, and when I pull one out and look closer, I see that worm-like creatures have burrowed deep into my hand, larvae with little black wagging tails and glittering star-jelly insides.
Now I’m really panicking. My hands shake violently as I try to tweeze more of the larvae out, but I can’t get traction on them. They tear in half, oozing bright viscera, though somehow still wriggling and alive, and stinging the skin worse and worse. My whole hand burns. I ask the other passengers if we can go to the ER, but they say no. They tell me I need to take care of myself. They sound exasperated with me.
I am exasperated with me. I’m not good at taking care of myself. I’m used to struggling and failing to take care of myself, and don’t want to do it anymore. Instead, I want someone to kneel down in front of me, and gently take my hands in theirs, and pull the invaders out of me, then kiss my forehead as a mother would.
* * *
On the first night in the apartment, Rosemary and her husband eat Chinese food on the floor by the glow of a single lamp, then make love in the dark. Many days of nesting pass: furnishing, wallpapering, painting. We don’t see the cycle of abuse – the trauma bonding, gaslighting, manipulation – repeating in this banal period between horrors. We don’t see how abuse transforms her normal into nightmare, how a trickle of her blood becomes a flood.
Now they’re all settled into their beautiful new home on Baby Night, ready at last to start the family Rosemary so desperately wants. They’re finishing their romantic dinner when the doorbell rings. Mrs. Castevet, their nosy neighbor, has made them a gift: two cups of chocolate mousse, her specialty. Her husband returns alone and hands her one. Relieved Mrs. Castevet didn’t want to come inside, Rosemary takes a tiny bite and makes a face.
It has an undertaste. A chalky undertaste.
That’s silly, he insists. There is no undertaste.
Rosemary, silly girl, he treats you like a child who needs correction.
There is.
Her seasoned abuser, he now swiftly unleashes a series of infantilizing tactics from his arsenal to shame her into eating it. First, she’s the ungrateful brat who wastes a thoughtful gift from a poor elderly woman: Come on, the old bat slaved all day, now eat it. Next, she’s an idiot, and his version of reality is the truth: It’s delicious. Then she’s the prima donna, the wannabe princess: There’s always something wrong.
Finally, Rosemary relents. It’s delicious! No undertaste at all! She takes a big, sarcastic bite, then asks him to turn the jazz record over, and, while he’s gone, pours the rest of the mousse into the napkin on her lap. He looks pleased when he returns to the empty cup, assuming his manipulation has worked, because it has always worked.
But Rosemary is learning.
There, Daddy, she says, looking up at him with childlike eyes. Do I get a gold star?
* * *
As a little girl attending Catholic school, I learned pregnancy is my divine duty, the most miraculous form for a woman to become. A woman becomes her most exquisite creature in pregnancy, unfolds like a white lily with a bright red pistil in the center of the world’s barren field. I learned Mary was the most vital woman in the history of Man because she gave birth to the Messiah, then held his still-warm corpse as tenderly as her womb had held his kicking fetus.
On the night of the Annunciation, the angel Gabriel floats above her bed and pronounces, The power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. The pregnancy, we are told, is consensual, and Mary is humble and servile in her acceptance of this honor and responsibility, blessed among women with the fruit of thy womb.
Apocrypha say Mary is a young girl, no older than fourteen, whose tender body the Father has chosen as the vessel for his son. Her flesh must become his flesh. It’s not a request, but a declaration of destiny. Luke doesn’t describe her impregnation, but when I hear of it as a child, I imagine it as a glowing crystal shattering inside the body, a shard of light planting itself in her stomach. The baby born of the Holy Ghost comes out covered in particles of star-quartz, glittering in her arms.
The talking baby doll in my bedroom at home eats yellow-green mush, then pees out the water I give her all over the floor. It calls me Mama.
Someday, I will hate my body.
* * *
When Rosemary opens her eyes in her bed on Baby Night, the night of her rape, two red orbs stare back at her, predatory eyes from another planet. This is really happening! she yells, waking from her nightmare, and her chanting neighbors throw a blanket over her face to quiet her. She wasn’t supposed to feel anything, to wake at all. But she didn’t eat all of the spiked mousse, and so took a weaker dose of the drug than intended.
In the morning, still groggy and confused from the sedative, she tells her husband about her wildly disturbing dreams. He mocks her for drinking too much, for sleeping away her hangover like a foolish college girl. From now on you get cocktails or wine, not cocktails and wine, hmm? he teases. Rosemary notices mysterious claw marks across her stomach, and he tells her not to worry: he’s already filed his nails down.
While I was out? she asks.
It was fun, in a necrophile sort of way, he answers, smiling unapologetically at his own rape joke.
I dreamed someone was raping me. Someone inhuman.
He pretends to be offended by the implications. Thanks a lot.
Rosemary doesn’t yet know her husband has sold her body and unborn child to a cult for the reward of a single movie role, that she’s now the designated vessel for the Antichrist, that the payment for his Hollywood fame will be her suffering. She doesn’t understand the severity of her situation. She only thinks her husband had sex with her while she was unconscious. He tells her this lie because he knows she’ll brush it off and bury it, a sign he’s been abusing her for a long time.
What’s the matter?
Tell him, Rosemary.
Nothing.
Feel your insides writhing with worms, the texture of your shame.
I didn’t want to miss Baby Night.
Trust your self.
I was a little bit loaded myself, you know?
* * *
When I was fifteen, a friend’s friend sexually assaulted me at her house. It was my second time touching a penis. He was thirty and I was too young, too stoned and drunk to remember much about the experience except how the organ felt in my hand: warm and alive, like a great worm with a spinal cord, a creature between human and inhuman. I don’t remember how it felt in my mouth – that place is all black – but sometimes, the feeling flashes back.
For many years, I didn’t think about this night at all. I never considered this a felony sexual assault on a child. We just messed around while we were messed up. I always felt a little ugly back then, with my hormonal acne and my fine, dirty-blonde hair, with my shy loneliness, my weird gait (Why do you walk like that? a girl once asked as we headed to class). But this man saw me and chose me. Maybe I was beautiful after all. Maybe I was deserving.
But how stupidly normal this story is, how seemingly interchangeable with the sad stories of so many other teenagers. How predictable that I minimized abuse from men throughout my adulthood, never attributing my undercurrent of anxiety, fear, and low self-esteem, that polluted river of bad feelings, to any of the trauma I’d suffered – trauma I never called by its name. But moments of such violence tend to burrow like larvae between your brain folds, nest in your bones.
A paradox of sexual trauma is you can feel uniquely disconnected from the world, existentially isolated in your brokenness and self-disgust, inhuman in your contaminated body and dissociative mind, and yet sexual violence is so alarmingly ordinary. You soon learn your own pain is textbook, knowledge that’s both comforting and a curse. You weren’t chosen to be saved, but neither were you chosen for destruction. You’re not special. God simply cast you aside, a weakling of the herd.
There are many others trapped in this hell with you, all suffering in their separate rooms, like the residents of an apartment building. You call to each other through the walls of your bodies. You hear each other, sometimes.
I hear you, Rosemary. I am listening.
But in the end, I am alone. Just like you.
* * *
As Rosemary falls asleep one night, she hears the Castevets arguing through the bedroom’s too-thin walls. The fight transforms into her dream, their words emanating from the mouths of the nun and priest in her Catholic school’s church. The school choir looks on as a builder closes the windows with bricks, so that all behind her eye will soon be dark. I told Sister Veronica about the windows and she withdrew the school from the competition, she says in her sleep, otherwise, we would have. . .
The rest of the dream disappears from view, never to be recovered.
Language breaks down under such colossal stress. Language will always break because it can’t survive the force of such trauma, which consumes it and regurgitates it back into the mouth like a macerated worm.
But still, we try. Rosemary reads the broken sentence on the desk during her apartment tour: I can no longer associate myself – and the dead woman’s thought cuts off there, dissociated, forever incomplete. Later, she spreads out the Scrabble tiles on the floor, trying to solve the anagram, to understand what she already knows but can’t explain.
So many parts of ourselves hide to protect us, ashamed to come into focus; the fragments of our darkest memories become the details of our strangest nightmares. If they somehow worm into our consciousness, they’re weak and confused, fractured things we cradle against our chest, hoping they’ll reveal some secret about who we are, and who we are meant to be, if only we can learn to love them, feed them, soothe them.
And who are you, Rosemary? Where will you be in the end? I picture you silent in a field of red flowers, red so dark they are almost black, each one of them an infant’s mouth blooming to scream.
* * *
One night in my twenties, a friend took me back to his apartment after a party. The sex, already of dubious consent, turned into rape. I returned to my apartment still drunk and dazed, feeling all wrong inside and – despite my insistence to myself that I’d consented – degraded and violated, as if my blood was replaced with mealworms. The next morning, I woke up hungover, sore and red and bleeding a little. I thought I’d contracted a disease. It didn’t occur to me there could be injury. It was just rough sex, a bad night. Everything would be all right, just like always, if I kept moving.
But I’d been browning-out drunk and couldn’t remember if he had used a condom. I couldn’t bring myself to ask him, to humiliate myself like that; saying the words would mean admitting the night had happened at all, that I’d made such reckless choices, that he’d been bringing me drinks all night because he planned it. Instead I bought a generic pregnancy test at the supermarket, hoping no one I knew would see me. Negative. Then I bought a fancy pregnancy test. Negative. I bought more tests, every brand on the shelf. All negative.
The next three months I spent viscerally terrified I was pregnant and didn’t know it, worried all the tests I took were false negatives and I’d miss my legal abortion window. I read scientific studies about cryptic pregnancies, and learned about a woman who gave birth to a surprise baby while sitting on the toilet, that you can be pregnant and still menstruate. I convinced myself I’d be forced to have a baby – and that I deserved it. My bodily intuition felt more powerful than any minus-line on a test.
Nothing scared me more than pregnancy. I needed to be punished for the rape, which I didn’t call rape, and which I believed to be my fault, and pregnancy was the ultimate punishment my brain could conjure for my crime of carelessness. I imagined the fetus writhing inside me, certain I could feel it growing there, like an ugly, spiny caterpillar bulging through my uterine wall. I wanted to slice my abdomen and pull it out.
Or that’s what I thought I wanted. What I really wanted was to cut the memory out. I wanted to cut it out, and feed it to the worms, so they could carry it deep underground, where it would stay buried.
* * *
Rosemary has felt uneasy for a long time. There’s too much pain in her abdomen, she says, like a wire inside me getting tighter and tighter. Having fled the apartment, she seals herself up in a phone booth and dials, breathing hard against the mouthpiece. She understands what is wrong now: the Castevets and her new doctor are witches and want to steal her baby, the baby she will name Andrew or Jenny. All of them. All in it together. All of them. She giggles a little from the adrenaline. All of them witches.
Desperate for help, she calls her previous obstetrician, the only safe person she can imagine in her life now, since her abusers have succeeded in isolating her. I’ve been to another doctor, and he isn’t good, Dr. Hill. He’s been lying to me and giving me unusual kinds of drinks and capsules. As she speaks, her forehead glows in a halo of sweat. You’re probably thinking, “This girl has flipped,” but I haven’t flipped, Dr. Hill, I swear, by all the saints. There are plots against people, aren’t there?
He says okay, Mrs. Woodhouse, come down. She sighs and smiles in relief. He will be her savior now, her lifeline to a more dignified order. Yes, Rosemary, there’s a plot against you. Yes, you’re pregnant with the Antichrist. Yes, yes, I believe you, he claims as she confides the details in the safety of his office, away from the bright, hot light of the street. There are a lot of crazy people in this city, he reassures her.
Monsters, she whispers, and settles down to wait for the ambulance Dr. Hill has promised to call. Unspeakable. Unspeakable.
Exhausted by traumatic stress, she passes out on the exam table. While she sleeps, he phones her husband and obstetrician to take her home. He treats these fellow men, these liaisons of evil, with the trust of family. He treats Rosemary as a hysterical creature. In another century, she would be burned alive at the stake.
Poor Rosemary. Accept your destiny.
Breathe deep, and hold.
Now breathe out for your child, who belongs to the world.
* * *
The horror film is fantasy, a way of viewing violence, atrocity, and trauma through the cautious distance of metaphor, ideally helping us process the most disturbing aspects of our reality. Rosemary’s Baby meticulously constructs an image of a sinister banality: the abuse that breeds secretly in our neighbors’ tidy houses, the invisible violence of psychological abuse, the capitalist delusion that walking among the upper class grants us safety from predators and abusers.
The defense her husband offers at the cult’s postnatal party haunts me in its familiarity. They promised you wouldn’t be hurt, and you haven’t been, really, he claims. I mean, supposing you had the baby and you lost it. Wouldn’t that be the same? He distorts the depravity of his actions, uses the word hurt to mean only physical harm, diminishes the pain of nonphysical violence, minimizes her sexual abuse as a mere transaction of services, as if being unconscious during rape precludes pain.
Supposing I actually was pregnant after that rape, and aborted the fetus.
Supposing I couldn’t abort, and gave the baby up for adoption.
Wouldn’t that be the same?
Many survivors of covert abuse, after meeting public incredulity and invalidation, or after too long blaming themselves for being too sensitive, weak, and naïve, come to wish they’d been hit, not because physical abuse is preferable but because its bodily traces prove genuine harm. For years, they’ve been conditioned to question their own perceptions, and wounds create records of violence. If Rosemary had walked into Dr. Hill’s office with a black eye, with handprints on her neck, he may have trusted her words.
The slow-drip poison of covert abuse has perhaps never unfolded so accurately on film. It unfolds for Rosemary over three hours almost as accurately as it had in my own life over the span of many years. Psychoemotional abuse in the home becomes atmospherically invasive, swirls around you like a toxic gas. Each time you open your mouth to breathe, you swallow a little more of it, and slowly, your sense of self and reality warp and corrode until you believe you’re both worthless and crazy.
By the end of that relationship, my insides felt entirely consumed by maggots, my brain an abandoned wasp nest full of holes. But you could not know the depth of my pain by looking at me.
* * *
The greatest horror of Rosemary’s Baby is the reality lurking behind its fantasy. Like Rosemary’s tormentors, its star-director is an abuser and rapist. It’s no secret now that on March 10, 1977, Roman Polanski took a thirteen-year-old girl to Jack Nicholson’s home for a photo shoot, then poured them both alcoholic drinks, gave her a Quaalude, and raped her. He insisted it was consensual, despite that she said No, that she was intoxicated by his own orchestrations, that a Yes means nothing from a child.
Everyone wants to fuck young girls, he said in his defense, as if they’d just messed around while they were messed up.
Though he fled the country to avoid prison time for his crime – the kind of crime we call unspeakable, by the kind of criminal we call monster – he still wins coveted awards for his work abroad, such as the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival for J’accuse, a film about a wrongfully convicted man, in 2019, the same year Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood erased his crimes from the narrative. For this film, he also won the César Award for Best Director, after which actress Adèle Haenel, who was raped by a director as a child, walked out clapping and shouting Bravo la pédophilie!
Polanski is a gifted filmmaker, and I wonder: was Rosemary’s character so well rendered, so recognizable to me as a version of me, because he knew from his own experience of abusing women how an abused person looks and behaves? Is that how I looked to my own abusers when they targeted me – meek and frail and plainly childlike – even as I pretended to be the cool, androgynous heroine, the legendary Final Girl who crawls through her own blood to destroy what hunts her?
Still, I don’t want to debate the merits of his filmmaking, or the virtues of art made by any violent person, by anyone who ruins the lives of the vulnerable for his own pleasure, who traumatizes others because he believes he’s invincible and uniquely deserving. I hate Roman Polanski because of what he has done, because men like him have done it to me, and sometimes I feel destroyed beyond repair.
The film makes me sick.
And yet, I cannot deny: I watch the film. I watch it because I love Rosemary. Because I have been Rosemary, sweetly panicking Rosemary, who doubts her intuitions, who rationalizes all harm done against her, who buries it all inside. Because her heart is mine – her stupid, trusting heart – heart that wars with its head until it bleeds, until both break under each other’s weight.
* * *
I still don’t want to bring a child into this world. I’m still terrified to be pregnant, squirm at the memory of that phantom feeling in my stomach, that sensation of invasion. I’m scared to birth a child into a planet on the verge of collapse, which is how our circumstances feel to me. In this way, I am not like Rosemary, who is a natural mother, a bony Madonna starved for love, her soft heart glowing through her chest like a fallen star.
Rosemary. It’s such a lovely name, from the Latin ros marı¯nus, which means dew of the sea. When born whole from her womb of seafoam, Aphrodite wore the rosemary plant to cloak her vulva, thereafter imbuing its image with the symbolism of beauty, fertility, and love. Once, Mother Mary draped her cloak over a rosemary bush and its blooms changed from white to blue.
Yet when she sees her newborn offspring for the first time, having snuck into the secret party the cult is holding in his honor, Rosemary is horrified by the thing her body has made. What have you done to its eyes? she screams at the smiling partygoers, backing away from them in hysterical terror, the kitchen knife she’d brought still raised in warning.
Minnie Castavet reminds her that she’s special, that she’s deserving: He chose you out of all the world. Out of all the women in the whole world, he chose you.
Rosemary drops the knife, calls out to God in agony, as the coven chants in celebration all around her.
But soon the baby cries, as all babies will. A human baby’s cry. One of the witches is rocking the bassinet violently, and Rosemary tells her to be gentler. You’re rocking him too fast, she advises. That’s why he’s crying. Then Roman Castevet steps in and tells her, in his own gentle, paternal voice, that she should be the one rocking him.
You’re trying to get me to be his mother.
Aren’t you his mother?
Hesitantly, Rosemary steps forward and rocks her baby, as the sea in her fever dream had rocked her own bed. She looks down at him and slowly smiles in curious love.
I want to judge Rosemary here, to mourn her sanity, as I now mourn my own. But I understand. The helpless thing she soothes is a demon – an omen of both personal and global apocalypse, a screaming bundle of her trauma, proof of her abuse – but it’s also a miracle of her own flesh and blood, and now she can no longer associate herself with her own self alone, can’t understand her life on this earth without this tiny piece of herself alive and breathing in it.
How could she destroy what cries for her, what needs her love to survive, after so long starved of love? After so long gone unloved and abused, so long gone without an offer of touch or warmth or gentleness, you learn to accept whatever morsels of tenderness the world will give you, and hold on to them for as long as you can.
Sara Eliza Johnson is the author of two poetry collections. Bone Map won the 2013 National Poetry Series and was published by Milkweed Editions in 2014. Her second poetry book, Vapor, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2022. Her poems have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Blackbird, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series.