Just in case the sweet words and the root beer float didn’t do the trick, Steve looked me straight in the eyes and said, “What we do together is a secret. If you ever tell anyone about it, I will kill you. You know I’ve been in a mental hospital and I’m crazy enough to do it.”
I believed him. I remembered how Ruby had called him “the crazy Indian.” I wasn’t about to tell.
After my root beer float, he walked me into the room where my mother and I slept. He tucked me in, gave me a kiss on the lips, and said good night. I’d never had a man tuck me in before; in fact, I couldn’t remember my mother ever doing that. I had a sense that it would probably feel nice to have someone who really cared about me do that, but something about the way Steve did it made me feel afraid. I didn’t like how close to my neck his hands were when he tucked in the blanket.
Steve followed the same routine every night he babysat me— first the bath, then taking me to his bed and doing dirty, ugly things, then the root beer float, then the warning, and finally putting me in my bed.
In addition to working at night, my mother and Ruby sometimes had to work on the weekends, which meant I was left with Steve all day. On one of those days, Steve took me to the auto garage where he worked and introduced me to the other men as his niece. He seemed proud of me, and this made me feel a little proud of myself.
Another Saturday, he took me to a rock store and told me I could have any rock I wanted. I chose a shiny piece of lead.
These gestures left me confused. On the one hand Steve treated me like he cared about me, the way Uncle Forrest and Uncle Frank had done. But on the other hand I knew he was using me. I knew he just pretended to like me in order to get what he wanted from me. And I knew he was dangerous.
I’m not sure how long we stayed at Ruby’s, but I don’t think it was more than a month. During that time I became more and more withdrawn from my mother and from Ruby. I felt so ashamed I couldn’t look either one of them in the eyes. I was afraid they would find out what was happening and would hate me. My mother would hate me because once again I was being bad. Ruby would hate me because of what I was doing with her husband.
Since we’d come back to Bakersfield, I’d been looking forward to seeing Pam again, but now I felt so bad about myself I didn’t think Pam would like me anymore. I was afraid she would see inside me and notice that I’d become evil.
Before the sexual abuse, I was the kind of child who minded her mother, or at least tried to—a little girl who could “be good” and sit alone in the yard for hours looking through encyclopedias or entertaining myself by imagining I was in the jungle with all the wild animals. I was the kind of child who pretended I was a servant to a queen while I happily cleaned house for my mother, who didn’t mind sitting on the front porch waiting for my mother to come home, and loved the time I spent with my mother curled up in bed reading Spoon River Anthology.
What happened in that dark and dangerous room transformed me from a child into some kind of freak of nature—a kind of adult-child. I no longer had a child’s curiosity and innocence. Those things had been stolen from me. In their place were horrible feelings of shame—a feeling of being ugly and dirty and vile. In their place were disgusting images of ugly body parts, foul smells, and confusing sexual feelings I didn’t understand or know how to manage. I couldn’t see a jar of Vaseline without becoming extremely anxious and I couldn’t be around auto mechanics or garages without feeling like I was going to throw up.
The abuse also created a huge wedge between my mother and me. The closeness I’d felt toward her in Ceres disappeared behind my curtain of shame. Although Steve had frightened me into silence, in some ways he hadn’t needed to. I felt so bad about myself that I didn’t want my mother to know what I had done. All my life she’d seen me as a bad child and a troublemaker, but in Ceres she had begun to change her opinion of me. I had been such a good girl, taking care of myself while she was out selling cosmetics, cleaning up the house, waiting patiently on the front porch for her to come home, and “going without,” as she called it, and never complaining. If she knew what I had done with Steve, she would once again hate me, I was sure of it.
Because I felt so ashamed and guilty and dirty, I stayed away from my mother. Once I had welcomed the occasional times when she let me put my head on her lap while she stroked my hair, but now I kept my distance.
To make things even worse, I also felt I had betrayed Ruby in allowing Steve to do those dirty things to me in their bedroom. For years, Ruby had been the one adult in my life who was kind to me, who seemed to genuinely want to spend time with me. And now I had repaid her kindness with betrayal and deception. Steve
