But for years, every time a man touched me – especially if he was older, even if I pursued him and told myself and him that it was ok – I’d catch myself looking through a non-existent dark window waiting for it to be over. I never felt like a victim – and I might even still argue that I wasn’t victimized enough to claim that label, and instead call myself a product of a premature sexual experience. Or perfectly normal for me to try to seduce a 35-year-old when I was 15. His adult hand edging up my six-year-old thigh made it seem natural to me when much older men showed interest or pursued me as a teenager. Uncle Doug did not hurt me physically, but he laid the groundwork for who and what I would become with men throughout my adolescence and into my early adulthood – a wreckage of fondled girlhood looking out a dark window whenever a man was on top of me. The poem: “Tulips in the garden, tulips in the park/But the best place for tulips, is tulips in the dark”. My only act of acknowledgement that he did something bad was when I crossed out with a ballpoint pen the “Love, your hubby” at the bottom of a poem he had written in my autograph book when I was eight or nine. After a couple of years, when I started to understand how inappropriate his behavior was, I refused to have anything to do with him.
There was never another physical encounter like the one at his house, but when he visited ours, he would request “private” viewings of me practicing my ballet and leer at me longingly in my leotard and tights he looked for any opportunity to touch me – my hand, my shoulder, the small of my back. What was actually happening is that he was kissing me, whispering in my ear things I didn’t understand, and rubbing the tops of my 6-year-old thighs, right where my underwear started, while I sat on his lap.Īfterwards, he took to calling me his “wifey” and signed notes to me: “Love, your hubby”. I remember staring fixedly at the window in his kitchen, into the dark snowy night, through a pane of cold glass, the moon casting shadows, a dark tree, listening for the howl of the werewolf, trying not to pay attention to what was actually happening. The broken glass pierced his throat, and then he was dead, his head hanging over the sill, blood dripping down the wall to the floor.Īnd then my sister went to bed, and I sat in his small, dimly lit kitchen, on his lap, as he nuzzled my hair and then my ear and neck, and squeezed me hard and soft at the same time. The werewolf would howl, he said, his thirst for the blood of children relentless, until one night he came charging through a window of a house trying to catch the little girl inside. He could do these pitch-perfect character voices, and in that way, he was charismatic and appealing to children. One evening, when I was six, he offered to babysit me and my older sister at his house.īefore bedtime, Uncle Doug told us both a bedtime story about a werewolf who howled at the moon in the bitter cold of winter on top of a snowy hill, just like the hill outside the window over the sink in Uncle Doug’s kitchen. Uncle “Doug” was an old friend of my parents he visited our family often and occasionally joined us for holidays.