unconditional love - within reason
A short story i wrote tonight. All thoughts/comments/feedback, positive or negative, is welcome.
The funeral was awkward. Of course, everyone acted as though nothing had happened, as if everything were still the same, just a typical mourning party on a Wednesday afternoon. As typical as the funeral of a twenty-one year old suicide can ever be, anyway.
The longer the afternoon went on, the more obvious it became that something wasn’t quite right, despite the family’s best attempts to ignore it. Photos of Annabel were shown on a slide projector, starting from when she was a baby & finishing with one taken only two weeks before her death. Even in that final snapshot she looked radiant, peering out from behind her glossy red hair with a bored, seductive stare. When the woman making the speech [mine & Annabel’s aunt] coupled that photo with a comment about how we’d all remember Annabel as a ‘sweet, charming young woman’ there was a rustle of discontent: a disgusted ‘pfft’ & folding of arms from our grandfather, a few people rolling their eyes, & a few muttered words from one of our other old aunts, which may or may not have been ‘that little tramp.’ After the ceremony was over, cakes & coffee were served, however this wake was short-lived, much like the girl whose death it honoured. Nobody was in a mood to stand around & talk about Annabel. People made their way home as quickly as they could without seeming rude. No tears were shed.
Annabel. My sister, my idol, for so many years. And now what? She was gone, & the image of herself that she had so carefully constructed & sold to all of us, all of that was gone too. Her death had come as a surprise. I’d been on the train, on my way home from work, & it was crowded. When I answered my mobile I could scarcely hear my mother’s voice on the other end. ‘Lauren, I have some bad news. Annabel is dead.’
A baby had started to cry beside me & its mother was loudly shushing it. ‘What?’
‘Annabel is dead.’
Two young men were cursing at each other & beginning to roughly shove each other, & I tried to push my way through the packed-in crowd to get further away from them, not wanting to get mixed up in their tangle of limbs.
‘Mum, I can’t hear you, I’ll have to call you back.’ I hung up. It wasn’t until half an hour later, once I was off the train, that I realised what she’d been trying to tell me. And even then, my first thought was, no she isn’t, I saw her this morning.
The next few days I can hardly remember. I think we were all in shock, it had come as such a surprise - she’d seemed so happy. Of course, everyone knew that Annabel had been diagnosed with depression, but she’d been that way for so long that unless she really seemed noticeably distraught [which she never did] nobody really worried. We all thought that the medication & weekly therapy appointments were taking care of things, & nobody really wanted to hear otherwise. It wasn’t something that was ever talked about. It was too embarrassing.
Our father reacted to the loss with anger. Firstly it was anger at Annabel - for suicide is a sin, at least according to our beliefs. How could someone who had attended church every Sunday for her whole life commit such a crime against God? But then it switched to anger at Annabel’s therapist. He started calling her up every day, demanding almost hysterically, why hadn’t she told him about his daughter’s state of mind? Why hadn’t she been able to predict it? He became very threatening & started calling lawyers to see what kind of action he could take to inflict revenge on this woman who was ‘supposed’ to have ‘fixed’ his broken daughter. At the threat of legal action, the therapist suggested that he read the files of notes made from Annabel’s therapy sessions. And that’s where all the real trouble started.
The files stated that Annabel was being treated for Chronic Dysthymia with periods of Major Depression, & self-injury. [We hadn’t known about the self-injury but the autopsy had shown her body to be littered with scars, which she had evidently kept hidden with her clothes.] However, the most enlightening part of the therapy files was the interests & daily activities which she had discussed with her therapist, which we had had no idea of. Apparently Annabel [who had always staunchly stuck to the notion that she was staying single & virginal until marriage] had been having a relationship with a man - a man twenty years older than herself! And not only that, but the files also announced that she had been, until recently, having a sexual relationship with a young woman as well, a girl she’d met at university. The pages were filled with words like ‘bisexuality’, ‘submission’, & ‘sadomasochism’. Our parents went very quiet when they read this. At first they seemed to think that there was a chance that parts of Annabel’s file had got mixed in with someone else’s, but then details about our family life which she had also spoken about proved that all of what was written was indeed, in reference to Annabel.
For a day or two our house was very quiet. A brooding, uncomfortable kind of quiet, in which we were too confused to grieve properly. By the time the weekend rolled around, my mother had had enough. She announced that it was time to begin the task of ‘clearing out Annabel’s room’. After all, this is something that has to be done after anyone dies.
Annabel’s room had always been the one point of chaos in our house of order. She was just too messy, too disorganised, but as long as all her untidiness stayed in the confines of that one room with the door closed, our parents tolerated it. But now they began the task of going through all that rubble, possessions collected & hoarded over the years, hesitantly but determinedly.
The first thing they went through was her chest of drawers. Hidden beneath piles of scrunched up clothes, the first thing they found was a tin of razor blades, blood-stained & rusty. And there were tissues, some saturated with blood, and alcohol swabs, & also a small knife. All of this went straight into the bin, my father wearing latex gloves to touch them, my mother turning away in disgust [blood makes her feel queasy.] There were lots of ordinary things in those drawers of Annabel’s. Mostly clothes, more jeans & skirts & long-sleeved tshirts than, it seemed, any one girl could possibly need. But then, in the bottom drawer, were other things, clothes that none of us had ever seen her wear. Things made of lace & pvc & fishnet, tiny skirts & tops that were see-through. Lots & lots of underwear, all black & revealing, bras & panties & stockings & one or two things I couldn’t recognise but which turned out to be garter belts. What use could our innocent Annabel, who had never show any interest in sex, have for such lewd objects? Our mother shut the drawer, shaking her head.
From there on in it was a downward spiral, it seemed that the more we found the more there was to find, & it was as if we had not known Annabel at all. There were books, magazines, & a few dvds on all kind of terrible crude things. There was a bag of assorted things which we didn’t dare look at too closely: something that looked like a dog collar, a riding crop [since when had Annabel had any interest in either dogs or riding horses?], something which looked like a gag of some kind, & a few other bits & pieces of leather & buckles & there was also a vibrator, which I quickly put back in the bag & pretended like I hadn’t seen it. There were letters & journals, which we flicked through. Most of the letters were addressed to someone she referred to as ‘Master’, & we assumed that was the older man whom she had been seeing. We didn’t read them fully but enough to get the gist of it, which was that she seemed to believe that this man ‘owned’ her, that she was his ‘slave’ & his ‘slut’ & that everything she wrote to him was written with a kind of god-like reverence. Then, in a pink envelope, the flap stuck down with a sticker in the shape of a kitten, was a photo of a girl. Long black hair, faintly Asian looking features, but Caucasian-white skin. She looked to be about eighteen. On the back of the photo was scrawled in careless handwriting: ‘I love you Annie, don’t ever forget me. Yours, Beatrice.’ With a series of x’s & o’s beneath it.
But the worst thing, I think, was when my father decided to look through Annabel’s computer. Because that was when he found the photos: pictures of her, our sweet, lovely little Annabel, naked, tied up & tortured in every way imaginable. The one picture that sticks in my mind [& I’m not sure why, since there seemed to be thousands, all very similar], was one in which she was tied up with white rope, lying on her front with her arms pulled tightly behind her back & her knees bent upwards, her wrists & her ankles tied together. I remember thinking that it looked so painful to be trapped in that position, yet none of that pain showed - she faced the camera & she looked perfectly calm. There was just a flicker of a smile at the corner of her lips, & her green eyes looked more alive than I could ever remember them being. For a second I almost felt happy for her, my sister, & wished that I had had a chance to see her as happy as that, or even as sad as she must have secretly been, anything but that blank, bored, neutrality that she’d always projected so confidently.
My mother sighed. ‘I just hope she wasn’t stupid enough to put any of these photos on the net. Or that that man, or whoever took them, doesn’t. Or hasn’t already.’ She sighed again, & flicked the switch to turn the computer off.
‘Yes, well, lets hope,’ agreed my father. ‘Either way, we’ll have to work out how to delete all this shit.’ My father never swore, so the sound of the word shit from his mouth sounded completely alien.
Over the next day or two everything was thrown in the bin. All the letters & magazines & skimpy clothes, & with it, as if to purge her from their lives completely, they threw out all of her other possessions, her ordinary clothes, her uni stuff, & all the innocent assortment of ordinary items that had made up Annabel’s life. They even threw out her computer, since they couldn’t bare to risk glimpsing those images of her again, even just to delete them. By the day of the funeral, one week after her death, nothing of Annabel remained, & what once was her room was now as bare as a hotel room.
And I didn’t know what to think, & I still don’t. Because I loved Annabel, really I did, but after she died I realised that it wasn’t really her at all that I loved, but just this projection of her, & it was all false. The Annabel that I knew wouldn’t have allowed a man to abuse her like that. She had more respect for herself than that. The Annabel that I knew wouldn’t have let someone she didn’t love take her purity & take advantage of her - & it was obvious that she didn’t love him, since she had been unfaithful to him with that girl, Beatrice. From what I’d read in the letters both Beatrice & this man [whom we knew only as ‘Master’] were both aware of each other, & didn’t care. How could Annabel have let herself be used like that? And by a woman, when Annabel knew perfectly well from church that our faith forbade sexual relations between women. No matter how much I thought about it, I just couldn’t make it fit together. Annabel had never been rebellious. She had always fit in, she was always good-natured. What had gone wrong?
And so, of course the funeral was awkward. Its difficult to grieve for someone, when you aren’t even sure that the person you are grieving for really existed. I felt as though I hated her, & I wore a yellow daisy-print shirt under my black coat to the funeral, just to spite her. You think I’m going to wear black & cry, you demoralised coward? was what I thought.[Though later on I did cry a bit, in the ladies toilets where nobody could see.] In the funeral speeches they tried to take the typical approach that I’m sure is taken at every suicide, of ‘its so tragic that someone who was so loved could have been so unhappy as to take their own life’. And again I felt so angry at her for giving up like that - I felt like it was ungrateful - & I think a lot of others did too & that’s half the reason why the whole ordeal was so uncomfortable. All of us had done everything we could to make her feel loved, unconditionally. At least, within reason. And I don’t think it would have been reasonable for her to expect us to accept her for what she was, when all of the things she was doing were so blatantly wrong.
After the funeral, we tried to move on with our lives as if nothing had happened. We spoke of Annabel occasionally, but only of her as she has been, not of her death, or our discoveries after it. It was surprisingly easy. Quite quickly all my memories became simply the ‘past’. I found that I hardly missed her at all, & that when I did find myself missing her, just little things, like the way we’d sometimes sat together on the verandah on summer nights & talked of things such as what our weddings would be like, & what we’d name our children - when that happened with a jolt I’d remember that that had all been fake, & then I’d sigh, & feel only a sense of disappointment. I think the important thing now is that I am extra careful myself not to stray from my path in life, that I don’t end up weak like Annabel did. I am my parents only daughter now, & its only right that at least one of their daughters should make them proud.
Occasionally things happen to remind us of her. One day when my mother was cleaning out the bathroom cupboard, right at the back she found several razor-blades, with the blood dried black on them. She had to call me to come & clean them away. Then another day, about six months after her death, there was a knock at the door. It was a Thursday evening, we were in the middle of dinner, & we weren’t expecting visitors. When I opened the door there was a young woman outside who I didn’t at first recognise. Her sleek black hair was pulled back in a ponytail & she looked as though she wasn’t sure she was at the right address.
‘Hello, my name is Beatrice, does Annabel live here?’ she asked, in a lilting voice with a hint of a Chinese accent. She had a sweet smile.
‘Annabel is dead.’ I told her, & quickly shut the door, before returning to my dinner.
Things like that.
But eventually it stopped. A year after her death we moved to a new city, & there nobody had known Annabel & there was nothing to remind us of her.
Still, once in a while, I remember her. A few days ago I was in the video store looking for a romantic comedy or something to watch on a Friday night, when I walked past the shelf with all the pornos. And seeing all those photos of women in latex and stockings just brought back the image of Annabel from all those photos. Annabel with a gag forcing her mouth open. Annabel with rope tied so tightly around her breasts that they had begun to turn slightly purple. Annabel with her hands in leather cuffs above her head & a collar around her delicate neck. And I remembered a few rare occasions where we’d gotten dressed in the same room, & I’d caught a glimpse of a scattering of dark purple bruises on her pale skin, & she’d seen me see them, but neither of us said anything. And I remember the look in her eyes then, just like the look she had in those photos, just this tiny secret smile & a glimmer of happiness in her eyes. For a second I almost wish I had asked her where those bruises came from, who gave them to her, & how she felt at the time & how she felt afterwards. But then, of course, I remember the shame, the look of disgust on my parents faces, & the dirty feeling that I got when I opened that bag of torturous treasures from under her bed. And I think I’m glad that I never really got to know her.
The funeral was awkward. Of course, everyone acted as though nothing had happened, as if everything were still the same, just a typical mourning party on a Wednesday afternoon. As typical as the funeral of a twenty-one year old suicide can ever be, anyway.
The longer the afternoon went on, the more obvious it became that something wasn’t quite right, despite the family’s best attempts to ignore it. Photos of Annabel were shown on a slide projector, starting from when she was a baby & finishing with one taken only two weeks before her death. Even in that final snapshot she looked radiant, peering out from behind her glossy red hair with a bored, seductive stare. When the woman making the speech [mine & Annabel’s aunt] coupled that photo with a comment about how we’d all remember Annabel as a ‘sweet, charming young woman’ there was a rustle of discontent: a disgusted ‘pfft’ & folding of arms from our grandfather, a few people rolling their eyes, & a few muttered words from one of our other old aunts, which may or may not have been ‘that little tramp.’ After the ceremony was over, cakes & coffee were served, however this wake was short-lived, much like the girl whose death it honoured. Nobody was in a mood to stand around & talk about Annabel. People made their way home as quickly as they could without seeming rude. No tears were shed.
Annabel. My sister, my idol, for so many years. And now what? She was gone, & the image of herself that she had so carefully constructed & sold to all of us, all of that was gone too. Her death had come as a surprise. I’d been on the train, on my way home from work, & it was crowded. When I answered my mobile I could scarcely hear my mother’s voice on the other end. ‘Lauren, I have some bad news. Annabel is dead.’
A baby had started to cry beside me & its mother was loudly shushing it. ‘What?’
‘Annabel is dead.’
Two young men were cursing at each other & beginning to roughly shove each other, & I tried to push my way through the packed-in crowd to get further away from them, not wanting to get mixed up in their tangle of limbs.
‘Mum, I can’t hear you, I’ll have to call you back.’ I hung up. It wasn’t until half an hour later, once I was off the train, that I realised what she’d been trying to tell me. And even then, my first thought was, no she isn’t, I saw her this morning.
The next few days I can hardly remember. I think we were all in shock, it had come as such a surprise - she’d seemed so happy. Of course, everyone knew that Annabel had been diagnosed with depression, but she’d been that way for so long that unless she really seemed noticeably distraught [which she never did] nobody really worried. We all thought that the medication & weekly therapy appointments were taking care of things, & nobody really wanted to hear otherwise. It wasn’t something that was ever talked about. It was too embarrassing.
Our father reacted to the loss with anger. Firstly it was anger at Annabel - for suicide is a sin, at least according to our beliefs. How could someone who had attended church every Sunday for her whole life commit such a crime against God? But then it switched to anger at Annabel’s therapist. He started calling her up every day, demanding almost hysterically, why hadn’t she told him about his daughter’s state of mind? Why hadn’t she been able to predict it? He became very threatening & started calling lawyers to see what kind of action he could take to inflict revenge on this woman who was ‘supposed’ to have ‘fixed’ his broken daughter. At the threat of legal action, the therapist suggested that he read the files of notes made from Annabel’s therapy sessions. And that’s where all the real trouble started.
The files stated that Annabel was being treated for Chronic Dysthymia with periods of Major Depression, & self-injury. [We hadn’t known about the self-injury but the autopsy had shown her body to be littered with scars, which she had evidently kept hidden with her clothes.] However, the most enlightening part of the therapy files was the interests & daily activities which she had discussed with her therapist, which we had had no idea of. Apparently Annabel [who had always staunchly stuck to the notion that she was staying single & virginal until marriage] had been having a relationship with a man - a man twenty years older than herself! And not only that, but the files also announced that she had been, until recently, having a sexual relationship with a young woman as well, a girl she’d met at university. The pages were filled with words like ‘bisexuality’, ‘submission’, & ‘sadomasochism’. Our parents went very quiet when they read this. At first they seemed to think that there was a chance that parts of Annabel’s file had got mixed in with someone else’s, but then details about our family life which she had also spoken about proved that all of what was written was indeed, in reference to Annabel.
For a day or two our house was very quiet. A brooding, uncomfortable kind of quiet, in which we were too confused to grieve properly. By the time the weekend rolled around, my mother had had enough. She announced that it was time to begin the task of ‘clearing out Annabel’s room’. After all, this is something that has to be done after anyone dies.
Annabel’s room had always been the one point of chaos in our house of order. She was just too messy, too disorganised, but as long as all her untidiness stayed in the confines of that one room with the door closed, our parents tolerated it. But now they began the task of going through all that rubble, possessions collected & hoarded over the years, hesitantly but determinedly.
The first thing they went through was her chest of drawers. Hidden beneath piles of scrunched up clothes, the first thing they found was a tin of razor blades, blood-stained & rusty. And there were tissues, some saturated with blood, and alcohol swabs, & also a small knife. All of this went straight into the bin, my father wearing latex gloves to touch them, my mother turning away in disgust [blood makes her feel queasy.] There were lots of ordinary things in those drawers of Annabel’s. Mostly clothes, more jeans & skirts & long-sleeved tshirts than, it seemed, any one girl could possibly need. But then, in the bottom drawer, were other things, clothes that none of us had ever seen her wear. Things made of lace & pvc & fishnet, tiny skirts & tops that were see-through. Lots & lots of underwear, all black & revealing, bras & panties & stockings & one or two things I couldn’t recognise but which turned out to be garter belts. What use could our innocent Annabel, who had never show any interest in sex, have for such lewd objects? Our mother shut the drawer, shaking her head.
From there on in it was a downward spiral, it seemed that the more we found the more there was to find, & it was as if we had not known Annabel at all. There were books, magazines, & a few dvds on all kind of terrible crude things. There was a bag of assorted things which we didn’t dare look at too closely: something that looked like a dog collar, a riding crop [since when had Annabel had any interest in either dogs or riding horses?], something which looked like a gag of some kind, & a few other bits & pieces of leather & buckles & there was also a vibrator, which I quickly put back in the bag & pretended like I hadn’t seen it. There were letters & journals, which we flicked through. Most of the letters were addressed to someone she referred to as ‘Master’, & we assumed that was the older man whom she had been seeing. We didn’t read them fully but enough to get the gist of it, which was that she seemed to believe that this man ‘owned’ her, that she was his ‘slave’ & his ‘slut’ & that everything she wrote to him was written with a kind of god-like reverence. Then, in a pink envelope, the flap stuck down with a sticker in the shape of a kitten, was a photo of a girl. Long black hair, faintly Asian looking features, but Caucasian-white skin. She looked to be about eighteen. On the back of the photo was scrawled in careless handwriting: ‘I love you Annie, don’t ever forget me. Yours, Beatrice.’ With a series of x’s & o’s beneath it.
But the worst thing, I think, was when my father decided to look through Annabel’s computer. Because that was when he found the photos: pictures of her, our sweet, lovely little Annabel, naked, tied up & tortured in every way imaginable. The one picture that sticks in my mind [& I’m not sure why, since there seemed to be thousands, all very similar], was one in which she was tied up with white rope, lying on her front with her arms pulled tightly behind her back & her knees bent upwards, her wrists & her ankles tied together. I remember thinking that it looked so painful to be trapped in that position, yet none of that pain showed - she faced the camera & she looked perfectly calm. There was just a flicker of a smile at the corner of her lips, & her green eyes looked more alive than I could ever remember them being. For a second I almost felt happy for her, my sister, & wished that I had had a chance to see her as happy as that, or even as sad as she must have secretly been, anything but that blank, bored, neutrality that she’d always projected so confidently.
My mother sighed. ‘I just hope she wasn’t stupid enough to put any of these photos on the net. Or that that man, or whoever took them, doesn’t. Or hasn’t already.’ She sighed again, & flicked the switch to turn the computer off.
‘Yes, well, lets hope,’ agreed my father. ‘Either way, we’ll have to work out how to delete all this shit.’ My father never swore, so the sound of the word shit from his mouth sounded completely alien.
Over the next day or two everything was thrown in the bin. All the letters & magazines & skimpy clothes, & with it, as if to purge her from their lives completely, they threw out all of her other possessions, her ordinary clothes, her uni stuff, & all the innocent assortment of ordinary items that had made up Annabel’s life. They even threw out her computer, since they couldn’t bare to risk glimpsing those images of her again, even just to delete them. By the day of the funeral, one week after her death, nothing of Annabel remained, & what once was her room was now as bare as a hotel room.
And I didn’t know what to think, & I still don’t. Because I loved Annabel, really I did, but after she died I realised that it wasn’t really her at all that I loved, but just this projection of her, & it was all false. The Annabel that I knew wouldn’t have allowed a man to abuse her like that. She had more respect for herself than that. The Annabel that I knew wouldn’t have let someone she didn’t love take her purity & take advantage of her - & it was obvious that she didn’t love him, since she had been unfaithful to him with that girl, Beatrice. From what I’d read in the letters both Beatrice & this man [whom we knew only as ‘Master’] were both aware of each other, & didn’t care. How could Annabel have let herself be used like that? And by a woman, when Annabel knew perfectly well from church that our faith forbade sexual relations between women. No matter how much I thought about it, I just couldn’t make it fit together. Annabel had never been rebellious. She had always fit in, she was always good-natured. What had gone wrong?
And so, of course the funeral was awkward. Its difficult to grieve for someone, when you aren’t even sure that the person you are grieving for really existed. I felt as though I hated her, & I wore a yellow daisy-print shirt under my black coat to the funeral, just to spite her. You think I’m going to wear black & cry, you demoralised coward? was what I thought.[Though later on I did cry a bit, in the ladies toilets where nobody could see.] In the funeral speeches they tried to take the typical approach that I’m sure is taken at every suicide, of ‘its so tragic that someone who was so loved could have been so unhappy as to take their own life’. And again I felt so angry at her for giving up like that - I felt like it was ungrateful - & I think a lot of others did too & that’s half the reason why the whole ordeal was so uncomfortable. All of us had done everything we could to make her feel loved, unconditionally. At least, within reason. And I don’t think it would have been reasonable for her to expect us to accept her for what she was, when all of the things she was doing were so blatantly wrong.
After the funeral, we tried to move on with our lives as if nothing had happened. We spoke of Annabel occasionally, but only of her as she has been, not of her death, or our discoveries after it. It was surprisingly easy. Quite quickly all my memories became simply the ‘past’. I found that I hardly missed her at all, & that when I did find myself missing her, just little things, like the way we’d sometimes sat together on the verandah on summer nights & talked of things such as what our weddings would be like, & what we’d name our children - when that happened with a jolt I’d remember that that had all been fake, & then I’d sigh, & feel only a sense of disappointment. I think the important thing now is that I am extra careful myself not to stray from my path in life, that I don’t end up weak like Annabel did. I am my parents only daughter now, & its only right that at least one of their daughters should make them proud.
Occasionally things happen to remind us of her. One day when my mother was cleaning out the bathroom cupboard, right at the back she found several razor-blades, with the blood dried black on them. She had to call me to come & clean them away. Then another day, about six months after her death, there was a knock at the door. It was a Thursday evening, we were in the middle of dinner, & we weren’t expecting visitors. When I opened the door there was a young woman outside who I didn’t at first recognise. Her sleek black hair was pulled back in a ponytail & she looked as though she wasn’t sure she was at the right address.
‘Hello, my name is Beatrice, does Annabel live here?’ she asked, in a lilting voice with a hint of a Chinese accent. She had a sweet smile.
‘Annabel is dead.’ I told her, & quickly shut the door, before returning to my dinner.
Things like that.
But eventually it stopped. A year after her death we moved to a new city, & there nobody had known Annabel & there was nothing to remind us of her.
Still, once in a while, I remember her. A few days ago I was in the video store looking for a romantic comedy or something to watch on a Friday night, when I walked past the shelf with all the pornos. And seeing all those photos of women in latex and stockings just brought back the image of Annabel from all those photos. Annabel with a gag forcing her mouth open. Annabel with rope tied so tightly around her breasts that they had begun to turn slightly purple. Annabel with her hands in leather cuffs above her head & a collar around her delicate neck. And I remembered a few rare occasions where we’d gotten dressed in the same room, & I’d caught a glimpse of a scattering of dark purple bruises on her pale skin, & she’d seen me see them, but neither of us said anything. And I remember the look in her eyes then, just like the look she had in those photos, just this tiny secret smile & a glimmer of happiness in her eyes. For a second I almost wish I had asked her where those bruises came from, who gave them to her, & how she felt at the time & how she felt afterwards. But then, of course, I remember the shame, the look of disgust on my parents faces, & the dirty feeling that I got when I opened that bag of torturous treasures from under her bed. And I think I’m glad that I never really got to know her.