15 March 1998: Jack the BeStalker

My great-uncle used to host a Christmas party. It would be sometime near Christmas, not on Christmas Day, so he and his wife could be assured a good turnout. Their children, my mother's first cousins, numbered five and each one's first name began with J, which along with my seeing them once a year made them fairly indistinguishable, one from another. Also my grandmother's sister and that great-uncle and their four children and innumerable grandchildren. Plus, just to complete my bafflement, the hostess great-aunt's side of the family.

Given the disparity in my grandmother's and her siblings' ages, my mother's first cousins were all a lot younger than she; in fact the youngest was only a few years older than my sister. That branch of the family was extremely religious; there was no drinking at this annual event. Not only were these people hard to tell apart physically, they also mostly lacked any sense of humor or any other characteristic to distinguish them otherwise. (One of them had a joke: he liked to tell people he married his sister. This was true: he acted as officiant when his sister married her husband.)

Until this one year, when one did distinguish himself. Fourteen, a fortnight away from menarche (not that I knew it), bespectacled, a mouth full of hardware, withdrawn, surly, paranoid, bookish, I must have been the life of the party that night. I probably had spent the evening in the basement rec room under the ping-pong table with a book, emerging only to steal Hershey's Kisses from the tops of cookies. (I've never understood why anyone would bake a cookie with just a sole, giant chip.) When it was time to leave, my mother and grandmother and I made the rounds. "Goodbye, nice to see you [an outright falsehood], Merry Christmas," I said over and over, desperately trying to avoid having to use any elusive name. Then a cousin's husband, whose name was easy to remember, even though it was also a J, because it was also my uncle's, Jack.

There I stood, every vibe in my self-loathing self proclaiming "I am easily bruised." There Jack stood, 40ish, swave [sic] and slick with nicotine. He took a step forward, seized me about the waist, dipped me awkwardly backward, and kissed me full on the lips.

I don't recall how I escaped that house. I hope I had already said goodbye to my great-grandmother, because I'm sure my blinding rage prevented any affectionate leave-taking. I do remember that once in my mother's car, I expressed to her (and necessarily to my grandmother, also in the car), my extreme displeasure in his presumption.

My mother told me and I quote that I had "to learn to accept affection better."

At no time did I think the man got any sexual pleasure from his action. I think Jack saw an opportunity to enjoy himself at someone else's expense, to exercise the power of his superior social position and age, to relish the humor others would find in his antic, and to mock an easy mark in a display of magnanimosity (my own coinage). Nonetheless there had to be something sexual in it. He wouldn't've done it if I hadn't had my timid breasts. He damn well wasn't expressing affection, whatever she thought.

My mother admittedly had to put up with quite a bit from me and my moods. I was 14 and hardly angelic enough not to be moody, but by the gods, when does a child's adolescent misery deny her the right to her own body?

The shock, the humiliation, the powerless of this rape (which if I counted it would be my first kiss) haunted me. Years later I brought it up to my mother again. In the interim, she had learned something about sexual abuse in Reader's Digest or whatever tome of conservative non-thought she currently espoused and her first insistent denial was that Jack hadn't assaulted me. I remember that so clearly: when I tried to talk to my mother about it rationally and at a remove of some years, her first thought was to defend him, not to stick up for me. I repeated what I had just said, that I didn't think he did it for any kind of sexual pleasure but for some other kind of power. Rape, a word I didn't use, has other definitions, but I knew not to explore that wrinkle of semantics with her. In what I said, she heard only that I wasn't making "that kind" of accusation and so sought, in her typical codependent way, thus to dispel any hint of wrongdoing: "Don't take it to heart. He's always been like that."

So I, the wronged party, was supposed to make allowance for him? No, I don't think so. I told her that, and to this day I am pleased I did because usually any personal discussion with my mother (about anything) frustrates me to the point I cannot respond to her well.

Then I told her what had, over time, hurt me worse than his invading me: her initial insistence, in the car going home, that I should learn to accept affection better, implying that my body is not my own. It had hurt me more because she was my mother and whatever he did, he had no loyalty to me to betray. She--a miracle!--admitted that she "could have handled it better." She didn't understand how I felt, she excused herself. Ha! She hadn't been concerned with and didn't care about how I felt.

Whatever. She had been of no help, but I didn't expect her to be; what I took from that conversation was a measure of pride that my repartees had been rational, truthful, and evenly delivered.

So that, I thought, was that.

Except that in the fall of my 29^th year, my mother remarried. Claiming she was going to do it "right" this time, her side of the chapel had three times as many filled pews as her groom's, so she could relish everyone's witnessing the right union (attended by the tainted remnants of her first, "wrong" union, my sister and me.) One of the guests was Jack.

There I stood in the receiving line. Fifteen years later, attractive, personable, self-confident, pagan, and bookish, I was ready to be the life of the reception. Little outward trace remained of the victim I once had been. I daresay that had my rôle in the wedding not made it obvious, he'd never have recognized me in the street as the child I was. But I would have recognized him. And I did.

"Touch me now and I'll snatch you balder-headed," I silently warned him. I take nothing from nobody now.

This time he didn't assault me physically, he wounded me spiritually. And I let him do it, the fat self-satisfied fuck. I greeted my cousin Janet warmly and happily; her smile is infectious. Then she said, "You remember my husband Jack; Jack, this is BJWL's younger daughter Lisa."

"The last time I saw you," he began, "was at your Gramma's and you were all decked out in camouflage and punk. I've always wondered what your great-grandmother thought of you then."

My great-grandmother is dead, bless her soul. She'd been dead nine years at my mother's wedding, almost to the day. Yes, I dressed outlandishly (relative to my earlier self and to my town, not to the world at large) in my later high school years, but you'd have to be a much worse person than my great-grandmother was--maybe about as nasty and black-hearted as this cousin-in-law of mine--to think that my gram would dislike me because of my attire.

Could he think of nothing else to say that day, like how happy my mother looked or how pleased we must be with the weather or what the fuck was that hamburger bun doing as the communion wafer, than some hateful comment about how I might have broken my great-grandmother's heart or befuddled her mind with my apparel?

For years I had dismissed Jack's kiss as the inappropriate and immoral action of an ignorant man and had been willing to believe the man as a whole might have a redeeming quality. No more. He is a worm.

"Scorn and defiance, slight regard, contempt,
And anything that may not misbecome
The mighty sender, doth he prize you at."
Henry V, II, iv