#MeToo (Part One)

My fiancé came to tell me he was leaving; just going out to run some business errands. He slid the curtain over, and I shivered as the cold air replaced the steam of the warm shower. I leaned over and kissed him; told him to keep me posted. He smiled, then I heard his footsteps; his hard-sole shoes on the tile floor. I heard him call out something from the bathroom doorway, and couldn’t make out what it was.

Then I knew. I knew he’d said he was turning on the fan. I knew, but when I called out to ask him to please shut it off and let me turn it back on when I got out, he couldn’t hear me.

I had asked him not to do that, numerous times. I’d told him what it did to me; that it left me fighting against panic, which was in some ways worse than the actual panic attack I’d have had if I just let it overtake me. In fighting it, I told myself it was stupid, senseless, ancient history… but in the end, no less real and so the panic would just linger.

It was more than half a century old; this panic, though it came and went throughout my life. It had set in on what was likely a hot summer day, in the basement of the home in which the babysitter “cared for” us; me along with my older sister and four brothers, and her own six children. On summer days, she put us in the basement, where the rabbit ears on the television fed us entertainment from a menu of grainy cartoons and game shows which most of us were too small to really care about. I imagine that there were toys, but I don’t remember them. The too-loud television occupied most of my memory of that basement, for the bulk of my life. It sat haphazardly upon a brass-covered wire stand, against the wall near the bottom of the stairs. The cold concrete was loosely covered by a slip of worn carpet. There was an old orange sofa and a bench seat from a car or pickup truck. It was navy blue on both sides, with the center being a once-white gray, fraying from time and children’s shoes and who knows what else.

Across the room from the television, there was a door. In my mind, it was always closed, but I knew what was behind the door. It was the furnace. In our own basement, the furnace stood alone, dividing the large room into the pool room and the storage room which would later become my oldest brother’s bedroom. The water heater stood beside it. I knew the sound that it made when our furnace kicked in, blowing hot air through the ornate metal grates on the first and second floor; one in each room. But at the babysitter’s house, the closed door muffled the muffling sound of the furnace.

I was in my mid-forties when I’d realized that I had in fact been in that furnace room. I couldn’t have been more than four or five years old.

I was living in a one-bedroom apartment on the ground floor. The heat and air conditioning unit was behind a locked door next to my bedroom closet. It was Saturday, and the air conditioner didn’t seem to be cooling, but I’d have to wait until Monday to put in a request for maintenance, unless it was an emergency. It wasn’t that; just muggy and uncomfortable. I ate a sandwich for dinner, not wanting to use the oven.

I was feeling particularly restless. I knew that it had something to do with the sound of the fan running, and the longer it ran, the louder it seemed to become. I tried reading, but couldn’t keep my focus. There was nothing on television, which was not surprising, as I didn’t have cable and the network signals I was sometimes able to pick up with the rabbit ears came and went. That was all right. I wasn’t much of a television fan anyway. It wasn’t bedtime, but I thought I’d go to bed early and try to catch up the sleep I’d missed the night before. I took a Benadryl; maybe two. I waited for it to make me drowsy, but instead of sleepiness, began feeling a sense of dread, as if something terrible was going to happen if I fell asleep.  All the same, I was too tired at that point to stay awake if I didn’t find something to do, to keep my mind off of whatever it was that was eating away at me.

I decided to call a friend, who did not answer. Then another. I realized at that point that my local friends had gone to a seasonal festival. I had been invited, but chosen to stay home. Now I wished I hadn’t. No matter, though. I called my sister in Montana. No answer.

I went down a mental list of everyone who knew me well enough to have some sense of my fears and anxieties. None of this was really new to me, but for some reason, it was worse than anything I’d experienced previously. There were just times when the memories seemed overwhelming, but not quite tangible. They were floating about inside my head, but I couldn’t grab hold of them. I didn’t know what they were.

Last on my list was Alan, my ex-husband. He wasn’t necessarily a confidante, but he did know me well enough, and did have a way of calming me at times. Just a take-charge sort of attitude which tended to make me feel I could, even though it came from a dubious place. I’d left him due to lack of meaningful communication, and he had since remarried. I wasn’t “allowed” to call him on weekends or evenings. I was not a threat to his wife, but apparently, she thought otherwise.

Instead, though, I called my son. He was twenty-three, but lived in a room over the garage at the home I used to call mine. I knew I couldn’t confide in Jay, but perhaps he could get a message to Alan and have him call me discreetly.

He was the one person I did not expect to find home… but in fact, there he was. He told me Alan and his wife were partying, with a bunch of guests. Probably best not to bother him. I agreed, especially as I knew that it meant Alan would be drinking heavily. What was I thinking? It was Saturday night; I should have known that.

‘What do you need to talk to Alan about?” Jay queried.

I told him that Alan knew things about me, with which I was having trouble dealing and that I was on the verge of a panic attack.

“You can talk to me.” He said.

No, I couldn’t. I told him so in every way I could, without just saying I didn’t want to disclose my deepest, darkest secrets to my son. And when none of those things worked; when my son persisted, I finally told him that.

And then a strange thing happened inside of me. It occurred to me that perhaps it was time to tell him, after all. It wasn’t my shame, after all. I’d told myself that for years, but I wasn’t acting as if that’s what I believed. So on that Saturday night, the end of September 2003, I opened my heart and spilled my guts to my adult son about having been sexually assaulted as a very young child, and about how it had clouded my judgment and led me to make poor choices, and how I could never put it into words, because in the end, all I knew was that it happened, and that certain things triggered memories which were not memories of actions or experiences or words, but simply memories of feelings I had: being overpowered, suppression of my “voice” and a desperate, indescribable fear.

It was in putting all of that into words, that I realized the truth of it all. The memories I couldn’t grab hold of were memories of memories of memories of feelings I had when I was too young to verbalize what was happening to me.

That’s what the air conditioning fan was triggering. That’s what had always happened to me when in small spaces where there was a lot of noise. I’d called it claustrophobia, but in truth, it wasn’t about the tightness of the space, but the noise that I feared.

I talked to Jay about all of this for an hour or so. He spoke in a calm, measured voice and asked a few questions, but mostly just let me express myself. At the end of our conversation, he asked me if I still wanted to talk to Alan. I realized, in saying no, that I was more calm than I’d ever been. I thanked him and told him I loved him.

I hung up the phone, snuggled into my bed, still aware of the noise but feeling the power in the absence of fear. “Bring it on,” I told myself. “I can deal with it.”

I fell asleep, and slept through the night. When I woke in the morning, the “dream” still in my head was vivid and matter-of-fact, very real.

I was in that room. That furnace room in the babysitter’s basement. I was in horrible pain, felt the cold cement floor beneath me and a great weight on top of me, along with two hands which were holding me down. Looney Tunes was unimaginably loud in the background, and I screamed and screamed but no one could hear me. My voice was swallowed up by the noise of the furnace.

I wept for that little girl in the basement next to the furnace. And in my mind, I’ve gone back so many times, to that room when the television and/or the bathroom fan is too loud. I still fear that if I fell or otherwise hurt myself and I screamed, no one would hear me. But that night; that conversation, that dream… changed the mechanics of the fear and dread.

The little girl has a voice now.