Chickenshit

Really, I'm just chickenshit. I have too much to tell and I'm afraid. I don't really want to think about this shit. I want to bury it.

Let's start here. My brother was five years older than me. I was eight years old and in the basement bedroom at my grandmother's house, reading a book. I think it was a Reader's Digest Condensed Book with a story about a Vietnamese orphan called Kim. I liked stories about orphans. I often wished that I was one.

My brother came downstairs and he started teasing me about something. I don't remember this part really...I don't remember how we got over to the furthest corner of the basement instead of in the basement bedroom. He said we should play dares, and then he dared me to take off my shorts, and I did. They were my white shorts with the silver rings on the pockets. I remember how it felt to have my shorts off in front of him, I remember how totally naked I felt. I remember the musty smell of the clothes my grandma had stored there. My brother said "I dare you to run all the way around the house without your pants on" and I said no and he said I was a chicken and a baby whale and he wouldn't play with me anymore. I pictured what my grandparents might do if I ran around the house with no pants on, and continued to refuse.

Maybe I should have done it. Maybe if I'd run around the house with no pants on, in front of everyone who was upstairs, maybe that would have nipped my brother's little idea right in the bud, and maybe he would not have continued to molest me regularly for five years after that.

But I didn't do it.

I don't remember everything; it kind of fades in and out. At one point I still had my pants off and his pants were still on and I was sitting on his lap. He was rubbing me around on his lap and it felt kind of good but kind of weird. I didn't know why he was doing it. He didn't really touch me with his hands on that occasion. My mother called us to dinner and I put my shorts back on and went upstairs.

Of course it didn't end there. It never does, does it? I know that the next time my brother came into the basement bedroom he locked the door and I ended up with my pants off again. He wanted to lick me down there. I didn't understand it, not at all, there was nothing in my eight-year-old brain that could account for my brother wanting to put his tongue where I peed from. It felt kind of tickly and sort of scratchy and good. He would look up at me while he was doing it, wanting to see my expression, I guess. .

(As an adult, when I breast-fed my first baby, he looked up from my breast with that exact same expression and I had to look away, I had to fight against seeing my brother's face instead of my son's.)

We almost go caught that time. My dad came down into the basement looking for my brother and I had to hide under the bed until my dad and my brother went away.

I think something similar was happening to my cousin. She was really obsessed with sex for some reason. She was a year older than me- nine- she always wanted to talk about sex, but even though I asked lots of questions about sex she was always giving me her know-it-all grin and saying "YOU know". She told me that her mom's boyfriend liked to make her mother do it in front of her. I thought she was lying but nowadays I know she probably wasn't.

Such innocence. Such broken innocence. That was only the beginning.