Somehow I always knew that if I’d ever seen the ocean, I couldn’t come back to this block. The sea was only three miles away, but I got my first glimpse of it from a plane. By then, I was far away from the beach where the Puerto Ricans and Blacks –but nobody from this block—went.
I had no idea what people looked like when they sunbathed, swam or simply fidgeted about on the sand. I’d seen pictures, heard stories about them, about waves that turned and spread their skin over sand. Nobody on my block went to the beach—not to that one, anyway.
Never could I understand why anyone would want to take off most of their clothes in front of total strangers. Or—especially—in front of people they lived with.
I can’t remember mother or I seeing each other without clothes. I’m sure she saw me, when I was a baby, perhaps in that part of my childhood that returns in dreams I don’t remember.
And mother: She must’ve known—or did she?—about the rape: she never made me strip. She didn’t even mention the calls the dean made—I know, I saw him—when a gym teacher sent me to the dean’s office because I wouldn’t go into the locker room and change my clothes. Oh, those nuns could be so unpredictable and sadistic. But, no matter how badly they treated us, they never made us take off our clothes.
I’ve since heard that in junior high or high schools everywhere, boys and girls go to their respective locker rooms and change from their pants or skirts and sweaters to T-shirts and shorts. And at the end of gym class, everyone takes off his or her gym clothes and showers. No way I wanted to shower in front of all those boys—or the gym teacher. And I told the dean so. And every week or so, after I’d spent a few days worth of gym classes in the dean’s office (or didn’t go to school at all), I’d be back, and the cycle would begin again.
I don’t know what mother told that dean or gym teacher. But, like I said, I never heard about it from her.
And the first time I saw the ocean, from a plane, I’d taken off only my shoes. In fact, I put on a jacket I carried with me—Why are planes so cold inside? By the time I saw the ocean for the first time, then, I didn’t have to think about or fear my own nakedness, for I had exposed my body—for money. They never looked, except perhaps for a moment, at my flesh. It was there for them to touch, grab, pull, for as long as they rented it.
At first, I didn’t understand what they were doing to me—I’d experienced it only in the basement of that abandoned house down the block, with Rob. Most of the customers were close to the age Rob was when he raped me. Though I experienced no pleasure—I wouldn’t’ve known what that felt like in my body—they were still somehow different from Rob, and not just because they paid.
They paid, and left me alone. They probably wouldn’t’ve known me in daylight, or acknowledged me if they did. They probably wouldn’t’ve looked at me even if I approached them stark naked and stopped them.
They probably would’ve ignored me on the beach, too. I wasn’t offering; they weren’t buying. Of course, they never would’ve gone to the beach near this block, or any one in this state, on this shore, for that matter.
One of them wanted to take me there. For pay, of course. It tried the litany of excuses: I didn’t know how to swim, I burned easily and my eyes and skin were really sensitive to sand. “It doesn’t matter,” he insisted. “But you must pay first,” I told him.
I set my fee, he paid and on the day of our scheduled rendez-vous, I was nowhere nearby, nowhere where he could find me. His fee was enough for the plane ticket. I had no idea of what I’d do when I got off the plane, but somehow that didn’t matter.
Getting that ticket was surprisingly easy. They ask where you’re going so they know how much to charge you; they don’t ask what you’re doing once you get there. You just go. And, in my case, it meant crossing the ocean, seeing the ocean. No one tried to get me to the beach, take off my clothes, not unless they were going to pay for it. Even then…
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