Anonymous - The Incest Diary

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I believe everyone has the right to tell her or his story. For many reasons, in telling mine, I have chosen to be anonymous. I have changed many specifics in order to preserve my anonymity. But I have not altered the essentials. I ask the reader to respect my wish to remain anonymous.

One of the therapists I lied to was a beautiful woman whose father had studied with Freud. I liked her until we got closer to the incest. When I was in college, I went to see her on Thursday afternoons. We circled around my family and I lied about my relationship with my father. One day she told me that she was concerned about me being at risk for self-harm. She wanted me to see a psychiatrist she worked with who would give me medication. I walked out of her office and never saw her again. She left me several voice mails over the following weeks wanting to know if I was all right. I never called her back.

* * *

In the fairy tales about father-daughter incestThe Girl Without Hands, Thousand Furs, the original Cinderella, Donkey Skin, and the stories of Saint Dymphna, patron saint of incest survivorsthe daughters are all as you would expect them to be: horrified by their fathers sexual advances. They do everything in their power to escape. But I didnt. A child cant escape. And later, when I could, it was too late. My father controlled my mind, my body, my desire. I wanted him. I went home. I went back for more.

* * *

The last time I had sex with my father was at the beach house on the island when I was twenty-one. I spent a week there with my father and my brother, who had just turned nineteen. The three of us hadnt spent a week together in many years; I hadnt spent much time with my father since I left home at seventeen. I hadnt been to the family beach house for several years. The gray shingled house with many porches and white shutters next to the water. With the American flag on the old pole near the white front gate.

That week with my father and brother, I wore a blue bikini top. The bottoms were bright red. My father wanted me. I felt his eyes on my shoulders and neck, on my legs, my breasts, and my hips. I held my body differently when I knew he was looking. I wanted to be sexy. I walked differently when I knew he was watching me from behind. Watching me as I walked back and forth from the house to the shore. Watching me take off the white shirt I wore over my bathing suit when I sat to read before I swam. I wanted him, too. I wasnt a child anymore. I wasnt even a teenager. I was a grown-up. My body was a womans body.

We played bridge with some of the neighbors in the house just up the road. They told me stories about myself as a little girl playing on the beachhow much I loved the big wavesand stories about my grandparents, around the time when they bought the house in the 1960s. We played pinochle with my brother. We drank gin and tonics on the east porch.

I spent my childhood summers in that house, and as a little girl I slept in that same upstairs bedroom. Many of my few happy childhood memories are from that place.

The first two nights I couldnt stop masturbating, thinking about my father being so close. At the other end of the house, alone, sleeping in the bed with the walnut headboard. I couldnt help it. I wanted and I didnt want him to come in and fuck me. On the third night he did.

I remember my father opening the old, heavy door to my bedroom. I wanted my father to open the door. I wanted him to come in. I wanted to hear him come in to the bedroom with the yellow-and-blue bedspread and the bookcases built into the walls holding my grandfathers complete Sir Walter Scott. Into the room with the curtains patterned with red sailboats on white fabric and the birds-eye-maple-framed mirror and the closet with yellow raincoats and army-green galoshes and the large wool flannel shirts hanging on wooden hangers inside. The closet with a plaid umbrella and spare flip-flops.

My father pulled off the bedspread and saw my twenty-one-year-old body. I was naked and I was wet. I wanted his big hard cock deep inside me. I was very wet. I wanted him inside me all the way up. I had never felt sexier. My body was pure sex. My father had made himself a sexual object for me, too. I objectified him as I objectified myself for him. I had an orgasm bigger than any single one I had in my subsequent twelve-year marriage. We didnt say anything. Not one word. Then he got out of my bed, went out of the room and down the hall and back into his bed. Not one word ever about that night.

* * *

He fucked me and he made me come. We never kissed. We didnt kiss that night, and we didnt kiss when I was a teenager, and we didnt kiss when I was eleven or ten or nine or eight or seven or six or five or four or three.

He never put his tongue inside my mouth.

* * *

That week on the island, I told Katherine Huntington, a family friend and neighbor, the truth about my father having sex with me. I told her what happened when I was a young child. I did not dare tell her about the night that had just passedbut I did confide in her about my childhood. I wasnt the only one who thought she was a remarkable woman. She was the opposite of my mothershe was extraordinarily capable, warm, independent. People adored her. I looked up to her and wanted to grow up to be like her. When I was little, she made me feel special. She would ask my opinion on things and squat down to listen to me. When I was a teenager, she told me that I was clever and courageous.

I always thought she was beautiful, strong, and brave. She loved to sail by herself. She could read, write, and speak Mandarin. She and her second husband spent a year driving across Africa. She was a volunteer firefighter in the little beach community. The only time she didnt wear heels was when she drove the fire truck. She would cook dinner by herself for dozens of people and her house was always full of guests. She had a greenhouse behind the main house where she grew gardenias and plumerias. Once, she found a baby bobcat by her greenhouse door. She gave it a bowl of milk and hoped it would reunite with its mother. But another neighbor told her that he had seen a dead bobcat in the road down by the market. Katherine took in the baby bobcat and gave it all the maternal love she had given her children. She gave it lamb for supper, with a dish of whipped cream afterward.

My grandparents had been close friends of her parents. I was close to two of her children and a niece and a nephew. I felt happy being around her family. I wished she would take me in.

The week that I was at the beach with my father and brother, Katherine and her husband asked me over for dinner. I asked Katherine if we could speak in private. She said of course, and took me upstairs to her bedroom. We sat on her enormous white bed with its dozens of soft linen-cased pillows. I held one of the pillows close to my chest while I told her that my father had raped me when I was a little girl. I told her that I felt like I was going crazy and I didnt know what to do. She leaned over to me and I thought she was going to embrace me, but she put her hand over my mouth. Get over it, she said. Dont talk about it. Forget it, and get over it. She then told me that she had been molested when she was a child. She said her parents knew and didnt do anything about it. But these are things to forget and get over, she said. She told me to go home to my father and not to talk about it anymore. She was never the same with me again. She wasnt friendly anymore and she avoided me the rest of that trip.