MOTHER STORY by Allison Field Bell
It’s the moment you wake up in your dorm room on the floor, your clothes on, your shoes off, a sleeping bag draped over you. You don’t know how you got there, to your dorm room, to the floor. You remember vodka and then nothing. Erasure. You stay there on the floor until your roommate comes back from the bathroom. You were so drunk last night, she says. You say, yeah. And you want to ask what happened, but you don’t really want to know. It’s college, freshman year, and you are not kind to your body. As in, you’re always letting it be touched by boys who don’t care about it or you. Something could have happened or nothing. So, you just say, yeah. And then your roommate asks if you want to get breakfast, and that’s the end of it.
You change your clothes. You go to breakfast.
* * *
This is my mother’s story. It was 1979, and she was working as an occupational therapist and attending graduate school in L.A. I’ve never lived in L.A. But imagine: the freeways, the polyester, Venice Beach. My mother went out to happy hours with friends. Tequila Sunrises with slices of lime, Singapore Slings with paper umbrellas, a long oak bar with those puffy metal frame stools. Or maybe the stools were a hard wood that scraped on the floor against sand. Can you picture it? Can you picture my mother – strawberry blonde, a peasant blouse, blue jeans? Her hair would be shoulder- length, thick and with a slight wave. Liquid black eyeliner and mascara for her thin blonde eyelashes. Tiny gold hoops in her ears.
Now imagine a man. A man with a lot of scarring, blond hair, blue eyes. Attractive.
Successful. He sat down next to my mother. “Brian O’Shay,” he said.
* * *
In high school, my boyfriend had what I later understood to be a rape fantasy. He didn’t call it that, of course. He told me that I should pretend that I didn’t want to have sex. He told me that I should struggle against him. He said he would tie me up and then we’d do it like that. I told him that was disturbing, and no, I’d never do that. He didn’t force me to, but still every time we had sex, I wondered if he’d rather I was fighting him.
That same boyfriend had a swimsuit calendar on his wall. I told him it made me uncomfortable. He asked me why. “Are you jealous?”
I didn’t have the words to explain. This was the problem. A rape fantasy. A calendar. Of the calendar, I could have said, You’re objectifying us. A body is not a commodity except when it is. But: I am sex positive. How do I reconcile? How do I explain to you about my eighteen- year- old body and how it needed reassurance, tenderness? Calendar. Fantasy. They don’t belong in the same category, but to my memory they do.
* * *
A bar. Happy hour. Brian O’Shay. He asked her on a date. My mother said yes: Wouldn’t you? The blond hair, the blue eyes. Brian O’Shay was a lawyer from New York. My mother was intrigued, flattered. My mother was thirty and single.
On the first date, he told her his hand had been blown off in Vietnam and then reattached.
He knew what my mother did for a living: he had seen an OT himself.
Before this, my mother had never met a man on a date at night. She always picked breakfast: it was safer and without expectations. “You had the whole day,” my mother says.
* * *
That boyfriend of mine became an ex-boyfriend. And one night when we were together but not together, he pushed my head down for a blow job. On the floor of his room in our small town.
On the floor where the mattress was: dust, a pile of dirty clothes, a spread of unread books. I said fuck you and walked out. Except, the reason I was angry was not the strange urgent pressure on the back of my head – you know the feeling – it was because I knew what it meant. I knew it meant he was sleeping with someone else. I knew it meant he had moved on when I couldn’t. I was in college at the time. He was a grade younger, still in high school. I was in college, and this was before I began sleeping around, before I ended up on my own floor, erased.
* * *
On the third date, Brian O’Shay brought my mother to a house party. A polyester dress and low heels. Pantyhose. My mother met many people from Brian O’Shay’s family. An aunt, an uncle, some cousins, a brother, a sister. She had a few drinks but not too many. It wasn’t that kind of party. “It was classy,” my mother says. But this isn’t my story. This is my mother’s story, my mother’s words:
We’re driving back from the party, and I had a paper due the next day. I told him this.
He said, “Okay, I’ll take you home. Let me just stop by my apartment.” And then, “Hey, why don’t you come up and see my apartment?”
”Okay,” I said. “But just for a minute.”
* * *
What does Brian O’Shay have in his apartment? Imagine: a few dishes in the sink. Neat but not too neat. Lived- in. A small two- person table, still sticky from his last meal. A few bottles of nice whiskey on a gold bar cart. A bottle of gin. Glassware: rocks glasses and Collins glasses. A map of the world on a wall. A classic poster of palm trees. A collection of records in the corner by the record player. A window overlooking the marina. Marina Del Rey. “In Marina Del Rey, people lived in apartments and owned sailboats,” my mother says. Brian O’Shay maybe owned a sailboat.
* * *
There’s more to say about that ex-boyfriend. This is supposed to be my mother’s story, but I can’t get away from him. You know how memory works. Another time, in a trailer he was living in, we were still broken up, but we had sex anyway. He had sex with me. I told him, “No, I don’t want to.”
He assumed consent from my body. And how is a girl of nineteen to control her body?
The body complies. It doesn’t want to disappoint. Meanwhile, the brain is floating above the body, spilling out of the rundown trailer that smells of mildew and cigarettes, whiskey, sweat. The brain is suspended in the fresh, cool air above an oak tree, waiting to return to the body.
* * *
So then in the apartment, he really came on to me.
I said, “Honestly, I have to go.”
And he pushed me down on the bed and there was that moment where it was like, holy shit, he is not taking no. Any kind of feeling I had for him left. I had nothing but complete hatred, and I felt so trapped. If I screamed, who would hear me? If I fought him off, what would happen? I just remember lying there passively, thinking how much I wanted to kill him.
* * *
Brian O’Shay’s apartment: What’s the layout? Where’s the bedroom? Is it a studio? These are questions I don’t bother asking my mother. What difference does it make, ultimately? Does my mother consent to see his bedroom? Or is she simply walking to examine the world map? Perhaps these are questions that would matter in a trial. There are no trials in these stories. But is consent granted by the presence of a body in a specific room? Or does it merely complicate the story? Why go into the room, Mother? Why go into the trailer, Daughter?
* * *
And now a different ex-boyfriend – try to keep up. When we were together, he had a picture of Britney Spears on a binder. He was a musician, and clearly, he did not admire her music. So, another fantasy. Another two- dimensional woman. What does Britney have to do with the story? Not much. Not much.
Long after we had broken up – both in college – we found ourselves drinking together. And then, with another friend too, three of us in the same bed. Drunk. Reading from Interview with a Vampire. One man may have been touching me. I may have been letting him. Which one? Does it matter anymore?
At some point, I leave the bed and head to another room, to sleep in another bed, alone.
I wake up with the ex-boyfriend spreading my legs apart.
I say, “Stop.”
I say, “No.”
He says, “It’s okay.”
He fumbles with my legs.
I kick at him.
“It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.”
Eventually, he stops, apologizes. He exits the room.
* * *
I wasn’t a virgin; I would have slept with him.
I kept saying, “I’m really saying no to you.”
And then: “Look, I don’t have my diaphragm.”
He said, “I got it. I got it.”
But then he didn’t have a rubber.
* * *
My mother was raped and she doesn’t understand it as something sexual, something that affected her sexuality. She has told me before: It was just violence, power. Like a mugging. Yes, you’re thinking, this is about violence, power. Or maybe you’re thinking, no, this is trauma. This is what trauma does to the brain: divides it into sections. Now, when my mother tells me, it’s not violence, power, no, it’s just something that happened.
* * *
I remember him dropping me off in the morning and being so outraged. I didn’t feel like it was violence, but there was a moment where I had to go along with it or fight. Up until that point, I didn’t have any reason to feel like he would be violent with me. He just would not take no.
He just needed to have his needs met.
* * *
Many times, I have woken up to male friends touching me, wanting their needs met. Kyle. Braydon. Danny. Ziv.
Maybe this isn’t part of the story, but where else do I put it? Unwanted men, unwanted touching.
Ziv: an older Israeli man, a scientist, a photographer. He even published a photo essay in National Geographic on Mongolian eagle hunters. When I left Israel, he let me choose one of his photographs. I picked one of a man with an eagle on his shoulder, wings outstretched, preparing to take flight. The image of the man and the eagle is dark against a brilliant blue sky, a swath of brown wind- cut land beneath them.
I fell asleep with Ziv and two other friends in a large bed. I woke up to his hands on my skin, up my shirt and down my pants, his erection pressed against my back.
For years, I hung the eagle hunter photograph in my houses, my apartments. I hung it over my bed, hoping I could forget the moment of the touching. Or maybe I wanted to remember it. Maybe that is the truer story.
* * *
I remember thinking, why is he doing this? I’m liking him. This is working. I needed him. I didn’t have a ride. I would have been near the beach. I would have had to find a payphone, call a cab, and hope that they would come pick me up.
Even if I could get away from him, where was I going to go?
* * *
My mother’s story: no cellphones in 1979. Can you imagine? My mother saying: “I was angry at myself when I went up to his apartment with him.”
My mother explaining: “My sister always said, ‘Never put yourself in a situation with a man that you can’t get yourself out of.’ ”
* * *
Don’t go into apartments with men. Don’t go into bedrooms with men. Don’t, for fuck’s sake, fall asleep in beds with men. Don’t drink vodka. Don’t drink Tequila Sunrises or Singapore Slings. Don’t drink with ex-boyfriends. Don’t talk with ex-boyfriends. What do you expect, you stupid, stupid girl? Don’t even go to a payphone. Because – you thought we were done – once at a payphone in Greece – no cellphone in Greece – a man attacked me.
He was a stranger dressed all in white. It was not a mugging, though afterward some of your male friends referred to it as such. That time Allie was mugged.
But no, it was not a mugging.
Imagine: The man touched you, your body. He tried to kiss you. He did kiss you. But we all know that kiss is too sentimental a word. His drunk wet lips on your face – your jawline, your cheek. And all the while, your mother – a mother – on the payphone, listening, not knowing what to do to protect a daughter.
Allison Field Bell’s essays have appeared in Witness Magazine, Shenandoah, The Pinch, and Fugue.