All Thumbs

If you tell your mother about our special times, it will hurt her feelings because she will be jealous. Your sister, too. You don't want that, right?

Even as I sit tapping these words onto my screen, I hear him delivering that warning in my mind's ear. These are the words that make me feel so much shame. Not because of what they were uttered to cover up-- I wasn't yet aware of what that was -- but for my inability to grasp their true meaning. I should have been smarter. I was the smart one, after all.

At eleven years old, I never wanted to do anything to upset my mother. I cared very much whether or not she was happy or sad, mostly because it made all the difference in the way she treated my sister and me. When we were good and her world was good, it seemed that our lives were perfect.

There was really very little perfect about our lives then. My mother had just married her third husband, a long-term friend of the family whom I adored; my grandfather's alcoholism was starting to become a factor in my little social life; we were living in a tiny, mouse-infested coach house behind the larger, one-time mansion of a wealthy somebody of the distant past; and, my mother's job depended upon keeping it a secret that her two young daughters were several parts "colored."

On one day a week, my nine-year-0ld sister would be late coming home from school because of her Brownie meeting in the school basement. That would be the one and only day she was allowed to walk home with her pals and without me. Her safety and well-being were responsibilities I took very seriously. I took everything very seriously. I had what the "old folks" called an old soul.

My mother worked in the Chicago Loop. She rode the Bluebird bus line to her office in a LaSalle Street law firm and back home. He actually was a driver on that bus line, but most of the time he would get home a couple of hours before she did.

On one of these Brownie-meeting afternoons, I was sitting cross-legged on my twin bed, which was exactly 15 inches to the right of my sister's bed next to the window. I was doing my homework so that I could get outside to play before darkness descended.

He came home, looked in and smiled hello, then went to their bedroom to change. I almost didn't see him come back into our room; I had my head down reading a textbook. He walked behind me and began to massage my shoulders, which felt great. His strong hands had done hand-to-hand combat in the Japanese Theater of World War II. Just the night before, I think it was, he had shown us the blood-stained dagger he had used to slay a Japanese soldier.

"Does that feel good?" he asked.

"Oh, yeah," I answered. All that seriousness always seemed to manifest itself in muscular aches and pains, especially in my shoulders and back.

"Lie down, and I'll give you a back rub."

I only hesitated for a nanosecond and that was because I was almost finished with my homework and wanted to be finished. But the idea of this special attention from my new "Daddy" -- something that I had craved for the seven years since my mother divorced my real father -- was just too appealing to pass up.

This scenario played out again and again for several weeks. I felt as special as any Daddy's girl could feel. The back rubs graduated to full-body massages, requiring that I leave on fewer and fewer items of clothing to "insure effectiveness," he had said.

Then one afternoon he introduced a new element to the proceedings. I cannot recall under what pretext he did so, but he covered my face with a towel before he went on with the massage after I flipped over onto my back. I asked why. He said it would help me relax to block out the light in my eyes. I felt panicky, unable to breathe. I attempted to raise the corner of the towel. He stopped me.

He felt me tense. "Just relax," he chuckled. "You're fine."

I wasn't fine. Alarms bells were clanging in my confused head. Nothing seemed right about any of this anymore. What's happening?

I felt those strong hands lightly touching my lower girl parts. He had already "massaged" my newly budding chest. I felt his four fingers of each hand on my hips. Then I felt his two thumbs barely grazing what I learned later was my pudenda.

Wait a minute! clang, clang, clang, clang, clang... Why am I feeling a third thumb? No, that's not a ... clang, clang, clang, clang, clang...

In one swift movement I snatched the towel away from my face, used my foot to push his body away from mine and SAW what was happening.

I was so ashamed. How stupid of me. Now I had gone along with and therefore was responsible for behavior that nobody would believe or understand. My fault. I'm a bad girl.

Nothing about it was ever mentioned again. And IT never happened again.