The influence of my past on my present life is subtle. I get
flashbacks and there are triggers. Sometimes I just seem to step into another
time and place for no reason at all. Frequently it is seemingly unrelated to
what I am doing at the moment but often it is. I can be sitting in my living
room and all of a sudden I am on a particular street corner in New Delhi or
driving in my car and I am on a bus somewhere by myself and I am not exactly
sure where it is but I think it might be the south of France. Tonight I found
myself in a little yarn store in the west of Ireland. These are all places I
have been…
I was making grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup for
my family for dinner last night. As I was stirring the soup, suddenly, I was in
T’s kitchen in New Jersey and we had burned the tomato soup and M made us all eat
it as a punishment for burning it. All except for G who refused to eat it. I
took a few sips and put my spoon down. I thought a few spoon fulls would
suffice but it didn’t cross my mind that I could get away with outright
defiance like G and live to see another day. That was also the weekend that G
and S took me into a back bedroom and spanked me and made me swear that I
wouldn’t tell anyone else. I didn’t tell anyone for years. Not even my best
friend. What kind of people do things like that to other people? What kind of
person submits and stays silent? Did Sharon tell them to do that? Why?
We spent two weekends in New Jersey working on renovating
T’s house. Why am I thinking about this now? I have no idea. My mind has become
a mysterious place that goes where it wants to out of my control at times.
There was a joke: “We are going to another state.” Get it?
Not 'state' as in New York or New Jersey but 'state' as in state of mind. Not so funny, huh? I don’t for the most part remember which
weekend was which but I do remember that we didn’t sleep for two whole nights
either weekend. One weekend they rented two cheap motel rooms (one for the
women and one for the men) and we slept in two shifts: midnight to 4 am and 5
am to 9 am. There were probably about ten or fifteen women crowded into one
motel room. We all slept on the floor except, of course, for two people who
were the favorites and they were ill. They got to sleep all night in the bed. I
was grateful for the floor. One of those weekends we had to cook all the meals
outside on a grill (they were renovating the kitchen and it was unusable) which
was fine for some meals but for breakfast they wanted an iron frying pan on the
grill with tomato sauce and eggs. Ugh. There was no shower and one toilet for
about thirty people.
Then also there was the question about why we were
renovating T’s house. Why did T get the free labor of thirty people working
non-stop for two weekends to renovate his house and no one else did? Why did
certain people get things and others didn’t? When was it going to be my turn?
Would it ever be my turn? Exactly what did you have to do to get all the
goodies? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. I wasn’t angry at the time. At the
time I was made to feel grateful for the opportunity of helping my “friends”.
“Friends” is a very big misnomer here. I can feel the anger and other emotions
welling up in my now. There is still the humiliation for the spanking – they
never told me why I deserved it but only said that I needed to change the way I
was thinking and maybe this would help.
We stapled fabric to the walls all that weekend until my
hands ached and I couldn’t even lift the staple gun no less shoot it. Stapling
fabric to walls was one of their standard decorating methods. It was a smoke
and mirrors solution: easier and faster than painting because it didn’t matter
what shape the wall was in and you could just cover everything up.
What else do I remember about that weekend? I remember driving
in the car and making up names for my pregnant friends’ baby such as “Hennessy
Courvoisier Rubinstein” and laughing hysterically. I remember waiting at a gas
station on Sixth Avenue in the Village for hours before we got going.
I remember that one of the weekends we did sleep at different
peoples homes who lived nearby. I didn’t realize it then but the “older
students” all were encouraged to buy houses near each other to form a small
community. We were all assigned to different houses at different times. We
spent part of the night snooping in the house and trying to find clues to the
identity of the people who owned the house and something about their lives. We
did find out that weekend that we were at A’s house and that he had been
married to J at one time. Slowly, we were piecing together the truth about the
group and our situation.
When I say “we” here, I am speaking of myself and two friends.
I think we were luckier than others because we did talk amongst ourselves (very
much against the rules) and we did share information and we did break the rules
on occasion. It wasn’t the norm to break the rules and as in any totalitarian
society you had to be really careful who you talked to for fear of being turned
in to the authorities for unsanctioned behavior.
