Ensler - The Apology

FOR EVERY WOMAN STILL WAITING FOR AN APOLOGY

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Vagina Monologues

In The Body of the World: A Memoir of Cancer and Connection

I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls around the World

Insecure at Last: Losing It in Our Security-Obsessed World

The Good Body

Necessary Targets: A Story of Women and War

Vagina Warriors

CONTENTS

I am done waiting. My father is long dead. He will never say the words to me. He will not make the apology. So it must be imagined. For it is in our imagination that we can dream across boundaries, deepen the narrative, and design alternative outcomes.

This letter is an invocation, a calling up. I have tried to allow my father to speak to me as he would speak. Although I have written the words I needed my father to say to me, I had to make space for him to come through me.

There is so much about him, his history, that he never shared with me, so I have had to conjure much of that as well.

This letter is my attempt to endow my father with the will and the words to cross the border, and speak the language, of apology so that I can finally be free.

Dear Evie,

How very strange to be writing you. Am I writing to you from the grave or the past or the future? Am I writing as you or as you would like me to be or as I really am beneath my own limited understanding? And does it matter? Am I writing in a language I never spoke or understood which you have created inside both of our minds to bridge the gaps, the failures to connect? Maybe I am writing as I truly am, as you have freed me by your witness. Or Im not writing this at all but simply being used as a vehicle to fulfill your own needs and version of things.

I dont remember ever writing you a letter. I rarely wrote letters. For me to write a letter, to reach out to others, would have been a sign of weakness. People wrote letters to me. I would never let anyone know they were significant enough to me to write a letter to them. That would make me less, put me at a disadvantage. Even saying this to you feels odd. This is not something I would normally know or say unless you had entered my mind. But I would not argue with it. It feels true.

You always wrote me letters. I found that peculiar and strangely moving. We lived in the same house but you were writing to me, your little-girl handwriting attempting straight lines but wandering all over the page. It was as if you were trying to make contact with some aspect of me, a part you could not find in the heated moments of our conflict, as if you were trying through poetry to appeal to a secret self that I had once made available to you. Usually you wrote apology letters. So fitting that you would now want an apology letter from me. You were always apologizing, begging for forgiveness. I had reduced you to a daily degrading mantra of Im sorry.

Once I sent you to your room without dinner and made you stay there as long as it took for you to understand and admit to your bad behavior. You were initially stubborn, quiet for twenty-four hours. Your mother was worried. But then you must have gotten hungry or bored. You wrote me a letter on a piece of cardboard that came from the dry cleaner with my shirts. You slipped it under my bedroom door. It was a dramatic plea. It was a list. You were always big on lists. I see now you needed to catalog things, make sense in a kind of literary arithmetic.

It was a list of what you had learned and what you would never do again. I remember that lying was number one. You would never lie again. And I knew even as I hounded you daily and made you believe you were a despicable liar that you were the most honest little girl I ever knew, although I did not know many little girls. I despised children. They were loud and messy and misbehaved. I was way too old to have children and I only had them to carry on my legacy. But I digress. That cardboard letter with your urgent writing in purple Magic Marker and the lopsided flowers you drew on the edges got you out of the room, and I wonder now if that is why you continued to write, as a kind of passport to freedom.

Since I left the world of the living I have been stuck in a most debilitating zone. It is very much what people describe when they talk about limbo: a void, oblivion. Limbo, not an external place exactly. To the contrary, I have been essentially nowhere. Floating, unmoored, spinning. There is nothing here, nothing to see, no trees, no ocean, no sounds or smells, no light. There is no place as you know place, no rooting, nothing to hold on to. No, nothing but the reflection of what lives inside me.

What is hell? Hell is oneself.

That is Eliot. You may not know that he was my favorite poet. His words come to me often in this limbo. I have been spiraling here for almost thirty-one years in your time, but it is odd as there is no time where I am. There is just an agonizing emptiness, endless swallowing space that is at once terrifyingly vast and utterly claustrophobic.

I left the world of the living with so many resentments and grudges. Even on my deathbed, the virulence of my wrath was more powerful than the cancer that consumed my body. My rage was so pernicious it was able to fight through the morphine and the delirium and fuel me to design and enact my final punishments. And your poor mother. What was she to do? I had terrorized her for so many years, battering her with my loudness, condescension, and threats that she was by then a cowed and devoted accomplice. She tried to humor me. She told me this might not be the moment to make such extreme decisions. She did everything but tell me I had lost my mind.

My very last thoughts and breaths were suffused with a desire to hurt, a desire to create long-lasting suffering. Perhaps you do not know this, but at that final moment, I insisted she strike you from my will. You would inherit nothing. Nothing! I said it with great force. Even in my very weakened state this vengeance gave me life. It was my last chance at abolishing you, eradicating you, punishing you.

And when your mother asked me to reconsider, I insisted that you had brought this on yourself. Why would I leave anything to a child who had been so obstinate and disloyal? Your mothers challenging me enraged me further and I became more vindictive, attempting to erase even your character. I forced her to promise me that no matter what you told her after I was gone, she would never believe you, as it was well established many years earlier that you were a bald-faced liar. Liar. I forced your mother to commit to essentially distrusting and doubting you forever. In that sense I forced her to kill you off as I had killed you off. I forced her to choose her husband over her daughter. But this was not new. She was well practiced in that sacrifice. I had demanded this of her for most of your life. And I knew, I truly knew how much she despised herself for agreeing. I saw the way I had, over the years, eroded her self-respect as a mother, erased her confidence and voice, made her feel weak until she was no longer likable or remotely recognizable to herself, and yet I had still insisted.