Soon I will no longer have any need, or reason, to feel shame or to apologize. I can’t recall mother having done either, or that she ever expected one or the other of me. When I was a child, some kids stole other kids’ bikes or jackets, insulted each other by questioning each other’s sexuality or practices, or damaged or destroyed property. I did none of those things, although they were done to me. Certainly that didn’t make me any more moral than, or superior to, anyone else.
I realize now that you only learn about shame and contrition when you’ve had to express them yourself. The only such experience I had growing up was having to say something called “The Act of Contrition” during mass. I didn’t understand it, even after I looked up the word “contrition,” probably because it made no sense for me—or anyone, really—to say it. Even at such a young age, I realized how silly it was, and how it was even sillier to talk to someone who wasn’t there, especially if someone told you he was there but couldn’t tell you where, much less how or why.
For that matter, all apologies now seem absurd—now there’s a word I wish I’d known then!—in the way that alarms installed after a burglary seem pointless and useless. The deed is done; the doer is gone—mentally, if not physically. He’s gone on to other things, unless of course he’s rationalizing or gloating over what he’s done. In which case he isn’t going to apologize anyway.
Even if I’d given that man a chance to acknowledge his rape of me, it wouldn’t’ve changed him, or me, or anything. You could even say that if he could or would see how he’d violated me, he wouldn’t’ve said he was sorry. I wonder now whether that’s what mother thought.
And so it wouldn’t’ve made any sense, or changed anything, if I’d apologized for having retaliated—had I done such a thing—in the moment after he attacked me, or in the future. Beating, mutilating, killing him wouldn’t’ve been acts of rage, an emotion that precludes—some say precedes, but I don’t see how—sorrow.
Mother never expected apologies from me, even though nothing I’ve done, nothing I’ve become, justifies the difficulties I caused her. I’ll never know—though I can guess accurately, I think—whether she’d wanted or planned for me. Not that she ever implied, even in anger, that I constricted her life, as other parents have told children who became some of the people I’ve met since I left this block. Vivian’s father always reminded her of his abandoned ambitions toward a musical career, or that he’d played drums behind guitarists and singers whose records kids—and sometimes their parents—in my generation, even on my block, bought and listened to. Maybe mother had no such aspirations, simply because she didn’t have time to have them. But if she’d had dreams, I never heard about them.
It’s no surprise, I guess, that she never even made me apologize for not having aspirations of my own. For one thing, I was never sure I’d grow up to realize them. In fact, I was sure I wouldn’t live long enough, or that if I did I’d end up in jail or a mental hospital. That’s what happened to the young men here—or else they simply disappeared. Even if I survived to seventeen, eighteen years old on this block, I’d had no idea how I’d finish high school, much less go to college. Not that I’d want either one. School, for me, was always just a place where I was prey and supposed to get used to it. And expect no apologies, no expressions of shame from anyone.
Not that I would’ve expected anything from the other kids—mostly boys—or the teachers, the principal or anybody else. Kids beat up other kids in the hope that someone else wouldn’t beat them. They won fights, games, competitions—none of which mattered away from school, much less this block—so they wouldn’t have to experience defeat for the moment, a day or—they hoped—forever. They did what they did—just as I lied, stole, sold my body and killed—and offered no apologies or explanations for the same reasons I didn’t, mother didn’t, why nobody on this block did. You don’t—or perhaps you can’t—justify anything you do to survive, to make it from one moment to the next. Some people—we often hear about them in the news—may try to offer an expression of contrition, an acceptance of responsibility, for their deeds or those of their parents, long after they’re done. But they’re not lamenting the deeds themselves: Usually, they’re ruing some outcome of it. Like that scientist who said “I have become death!”-- or something like that-- long after he and his colleagues exploded the first atomic bomb.
