On a weekend in late 2007, twenty-three at the time, I drove to Myrtle Beach for one of the last times I’d ever see my childhood home. At my arrival, my dad was unconscious in a recliner in the living room, MTV’s Room Raiders playing on the TV. On the show, a college student slightly younger than me investigated a guy’s bedroom with a UV light. The unspoken winked-at joke was that she was looking for semen stains on the bedsheets.
My dad had been addicted to oxycontin for several years, supposedly tying back to a car crash in 2000, of which I only first heard about in 2003, during my first year of college. He would call me and tell me long, rambling stories about hackers draining his life savings, a car crash where a tourist T-boned his work truck. Soon after, he started talking more about how he was now “retired” at 43, while other times he was “on disability” from a crushed spinal disc. I had no memory of my dad having a crash, no memory of him being truly injured, but at some point, he had made it a reality. The addiction came later, never verbally acknowledged, and left me awkwardly holding the observation with nowhere to safely place it.
I never felt like I could trust my own read of my relationship with him, because at any moment, he could reframe it and act like I was an idiot for not understanding. His wife Lisa’s daughter Stephanie, only a year younger, vented to me one afternoon that she was sure he was committing insurance fraud. But even with that said out loud, all I could think was, “Okay? What do I do with that information?” My dad had made sure I knew that no one ever cared about what I thought. I was a wasted recipient of Stephanie’s frustration, merely shrugging.
Under the influence of oxycontin, my dad softened into unintelligible sleepiness and incoherent tangents. Lisa emerged from the kitchen to announce that I was there, causing him to jolt awake and slur a hello to me in an octogenarian-sounding rasp.
Once a man who had aggressively surveilled me as a child, it was clear he was no longer tracking me as I grew into adulthood. I’d continue into my 40s to have recurring dreams of finding hidden cameras in rooms, of being watched, but it’s hard to be surveilled by the drowsily shut eyes of a dosed addict. In either case, I felt exceptionally alone with myself, unsafe in front of a man I felt knew too much intimate detail about a past version of me and practically nothing about my current self.
On a side table near his chair, next to his pills, stood a framed photo of a vacuum cleaner. I looked at it quizzically, but he was too lost in his half-asleep stupor to notice my expression, so I chortled and asked, “What’s up with the photo?”
He suddenly came alive, the question activating him like a comedian sleeper cell, eager to do a bit for his audience. “Well, you know how people like to keep family photos around? How do you think the vacuum cleaner must have felt not having her loved ones on display?”
I groaned, but still laughed. This was the purest, most quintessential part of my dad’s personality, one of the few parts of him I treasured. I later relayed the story to my friend Ben, who responded, “Okay Aimee, your dad is insane…” But I didn’t know what to make of his comment. Of all the reasons my dad could be deemed insane, I asked myself, why should it be that? Why something so innocuous? When we were in high school, dating each other, I’d invited Ben over to my house. My dad summoned us into his room to talk to him. The door was open, but as we stepped inside, Ben noticed he was watching porn. He left it playing, muted, as he made light conversation with us, sharing a story about a time when I was three years old and he had pretended to make a phone call to a stranger as I stood staring in panic out the window.
He’d let the unknown person on the other end know that they could come take me away. His face lit up as he recalled to Ben the look of terror on my toddler face. I shrugged, acknowledging that my dad was a troll, laughing, but unable to understand what was funny about any of it. The joke being that my age-appropriate terror was something to mock, that the biggest threat you can make to a three-year-old is to literally remove them from everything they know and love into an unknown stranger’s arms… and that this is a core memory my dad has of my childhood, one that he thinks is appropriate to share with my then-boyfriend. As we left my dad’s room, Ben whispered, “What the fuck was up with the porn?” I hadn’t even noticed it.
With my dad, it was often hard to know what was real, what was normal, what wasn’t normal. I couldn’t comprehend that someone could make me laugh while also making other people laugh at the expense of my own dignity. I couldn’t fathom the complexity of someone doing something bad to me, over and over again, not actually knowing or believing that the things he did were bad.
—
It would be years before I’d even start to see how intention is a confusing funhouse mirror that looks differently depending on what angle one looks into it from. That culpability is only a judgment delivered by witnesses, not a guaranteed admission from the suspect himself.
—
I still visited home at Thanksgiving and Christmas, even though I was never invited, and my presence felt barely tolerated. As long as I kept visiting, it gave me permission to pretend that every uncomfortable memory was somehow false, despite the fact that new bad memories kept accumulating with every new trip.
Now more awake, my dad changed the channel and began watching the movie Election. Matthew Broderick’s character, a high school teacher, was having sex with his wife, angled from her point of view looking into his face. Mr. McCallister, the character, started to picture the face of his student, Tracey Flick, calmly saying, “Fuck me, Mr. McCallister. Fuck me hard!” My dad was holding the remote, could have changed the channel, but didn’t.
Time felt endless, my interior patting the walls of a fuzzy distant feeling, sightless memories, dread that I could feel in my body without words. These were uncertain moments of similar boundary violations involving my dad passing through me, including the moment with Ben and the porn. And yet, I was left empty, unable to name the feeling. It felt hard to hold in my mind for more than a second without feeling waves of disgust, discomfort, and unease reel through me, also words I couldn’t use at the time. Those were words for feelings I knew that I caused in other people, and that whatever I was feeling couldn’t possibly be that… because if it were, then how would I live knowing that I make people feel that way just by being myself? It was an impossible feeling to hold.
Lisa was nearby in the kitchen, and I wanted to turn to her, and ask her, “Um, are you witnessing this?” But I was frozen in place, unable to get up to leave, unable to say a word, because I knew: she was not witnessing this at all. She had a toxic positivity to her that made her refuse to acknowledge the red flags or her questionable complicity with them.
She’d been in my life since I was nine, treated me like I was an obstacle in her relationship that she wished she could erase. “Why can’t you just go live with your mom?” and “Why can’t you be normal like the rest of us?,” she’d spat at me years earlier.
These were questions I’d heard many times throughout my life. They seemed to land on me as honest admissions that life would be easier for them if I weren't there. The person speaking the words would typically quickly apologize for the outburst, but the apology only seemed to be for the outburst, not for fact that they told me I didn't belong.
Lisa had never apologized for any of her words, had encouraged and relished when her sons bullied me. She had laughed about me behind my back to others, while I was still in earshot. My dad seemed oblivious or uncaring to intervene.
Now that I lived hours away, she was cordial with me but in a performative way, like a waitress working a crowd for tips, with an arsenal of canned commentary about things she’d seen on the local news, what was happening on ABC’s prime time reality TV that night, and stories about a soon-to-be restaurant that my dad had promised to help her open, Lisa’s Donuts and Dogs. The restaurant rang like a lucid fever dream with a business plan featuring doughnuts, coney dogs, free child care, a St. Jude’s wishing fountain, blue plate specials, and caroms games. Each visit, she would tell me about a new location they’d visited, never with a finalized lease. Sometimes there were people they interviewed for a manager who they’d never hire, and why would they, when it was so clearly a business that would never exist beyond my dad’s oxy highs.
As she stirred beef in a pan, she sighed loudly and said—to no one in particular—that she really needed a valium. I’d never actually seen her take a valium, but she’d joke about its relief with the lived in knowledge only an addict could have. Finally free from the awkwardness of the sex scene, I got up to get a drink from the fridge. As I told Lisa about my latest new hobby, weightlifting, she poked her head into the living room where my dad was starting to nod off again, “Do you hear that, Tim? Aimee’s doing squats. See, I should start going to the gym too!”
Her comments were encouraging to me, but I knew they were spoken more to create a segue so she could talk more about her own world. She struck me as lonely and it felt familiar. I was living with Eric, who treated me with little more than contempt and acerbic commentary on my social awkwardness. Despite my shaky background with Lisa, I took the only offer anyone was giving me to perform the social ritual of a simple conversation with a person not spitting at me as they talk.
As my dad lulled back into sleep, I mentioned to Lisa my recent discovery of the credit card that he had taken out in my name. It was the first I’d discover out of a much bigger pile of debt. It didn’t register to me, even knowing it was her handwriting on the signature line, that it was the wrong topic to bring up. She shifted backwards with a dramatic aghast and scolded me for even daring make such an accusation. But it was the truth and he’d even admitted it when he said he’d wanted to give me the “gift of good credit.” Yet whatever she said, it worked, and I backed off, felt a shame for even daring think about my dad being a criminal. But he was. And he is. But to her, it was more important for the balance of her world that I carry the pretense that he’s not.
I sulked to my teenage bedroom at the very back of the house. The room was part of an extension that was added in 2000 before Lisa’s sons moved in with us. Stephan (12) and Robert (9) took over my childhood bedroom, while Stephanie and I would move into the two new bedrooms, which my dad had decorated with a textured wallpaper of muted shabby chic sea oats in muted beach tones.
Lisa’s kids had active social lives and came and went with their friends as they pleased, but I had spent almost all of my teenage years, aside from when I was at school, in the confines of this bedroom, feeling unsafe to be anywhere in my house given the likelihood of being bullied. Even though no one had actually confined me, I'd still wait until no one was home to go to the bathroom or get water, scared.
I had spent most of my childhood online, and the habit followed me into my twenties. The room now a guest room with a computer desk, I sat myself down and shook the mouse to wake the computer up, getting on AOL Instant Messenger to let Eric know I had made it to my dad’s house.
He messaged me back that he was inviting some girls over while I was gone and shared with me snippets of chat logs from a couple of friends. He’d whine to these girls about how I wasn’t having sex with him, glossing over the details that he had been absolutely cruel to me when I disclosed a background of sex abuse as he took my virginity. The girls, not having that context, consoled him and ironically offered him blowjobs, except there was no irony to it at all, and I was the butt of the joke: his pathetic weird girlfriend.
I’d usually fight back at Eric when he pulled things like this, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that at my dad’s house. A few years earlier, when I was nineteen, my dad came to my room while I was visiting for winter break, and for reasons I don’t even remember, informed me that he had a “packet sniffer” installed on his home network and that he could read any messages I sent online. I had no way of knowing whether that was true or not. He was a technically capable person, had surveilled me in much stranger ways, so I’d learned to not do anything even remotely questionable online while visiting home.
And the boundary violations didn’t stop there. The same weekend my dad had made that threat, I was looking around at the other devices on the network in my dad’s house, when I came across an entire folder of disturbing pornographic photos of my dad and Lisa. Most people would flinch reactively, close the folder immediately. But I was so jaded by it. This wasn’t the first time I’d seen these people naked and sexual.
The fact that Lisa was being cuckholded in these photos didn’t shock me. None of it was new, and I knew that it being shared was not a simple mistake. My entire childhood was ensconced in adult sexuality that I had no escape from. Yet I felt dirty for it, and even more dirty, for being unable to summon the amount of disgust a normal individual would feel. Instead, I browsed through them, then threw caution to the wind, and opened a new IM to my friend Nick, and told him what I’d witnessed and how disgusting it was in the most brutal way possible, hoping my dad was reading it.
Nick was also jaded. At the young age of 23, he was already wistful for his sown oats with a crazy ex who was good in bed, but had a sort of hollowness to his affect when he talked about all of it. He could compartmentalize sexual desire from emotions and speak about it with a distant nonchalance, whereas my preconceptions of sexuality were a mixed bag, something I felt I owed to men in exchange for acceptance, and even despite that, couldn't relinquish... I felt like I was physically allergic to it and I didn't know what was wrong with me, why I would tense up when a man laid his hand on me. Nick could quietly read things like this on me, even when I talked around it, but was polite enough to never make me feel weird for it.
Instead, Nick always had a nonchalant similar story to share. It felt like he collected weird stories for the sake of conversation and I hoped he’d have something good for me this time, something to take the edge off the numbness and make me laugh, maybe a story about how he ran into his grandma leaving an orgy with her tits out or something, but this time he didn’t. He just said, “Jesus Christ, Aimee.”
I got up and went out to my car and drove to the beach. My favorite was Springmaid Pier because you could walk south on the sand and end up at Myrtle Beach State Park. It was one of the few places in the area that had not been corrupted by tourism. Earlier that year, Hard Rock Cafe had purchased the outlet mall where I had my first job and turned it into a theme park. A lot of my childhood felt similar, being culturally displaced by large corporations and watching spaces get colonized into repetitive tourist traps that my dad would go to himself, leaving me at home alone.
Visiting it as an adult, none of it felt like home because it was all space I’d never set foot in.
Late November, it was too cold to walk in the water, windy in a way that would push fine salt and sand into my eyes, forcing me to squint, and I felt a heaviness in my ribs as I exhaled, wondering why I was even there, not letting myself think about how all of the discomfort I felt in Myrtle Beach was still a reprieve from the life waiting back for me with Eric.
I could sleep in a clean bed free from roaches, wash my hair, and simply exist behind a closed door by myself if I wanted to. But this time, it wasn’t enough of a reprieve, I felt emotionally hungover, and I decided to leave my dad’s house and go back to Columbia.
As I left his house, carrying my bags out to the car, my dad stood up to see me out. He always did this now that he was on oxy, would get up and wave me off as I left, the sharpness that threatened me with network packet sniffers whittled down. He stopped me near the door and said, trying to be encouraging, “You’ve really gotten your body together. I’m proud of you. I remember when you were younger, and you got kind of pudgy.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about. I was so thin as a teenager, that Stephanie often would call attention to it, almost accusingly towards me as if I were voluntarily thin to the point that you could see my ribs and pelvis. On the rare occasion that food would be placed in front of me, I wouldn’t eat it, hungry to the point that it hurt to eat more than a bite.
The only time I could remember ever gaining weight was when I was 11 or 12, but the memory was so fuzzy and blurry. My body changed rapidly over just a few weeks, my breasts suddenly firmer and plumper than ever before. I could remember the way all the boys in my class would snap my bra, the way a girl nastily condescended to me, “I don’t know why you wear tight t-shirts when you have nothing to show off.” I was likely three cup sizes larger than her and the shirt was indeed two sizes too small. It was just one of many ignored signs of neglect, not a precociously developed sexual identity.
Was that the body my dad was talking about?
My parents had fought so hard that year that I didn’t have much room left in me to remember these kinds of memories. I instead had to keep a much closer vigil on their violence.
I drove away from his house, finally allowing myself to cry over the exchange, but not knowing with any certainty what I was crying about. Why had my dad tracked my 11-year-old pubescent body as if its development were my personal failure, something irresponsible I had done? Thinking about it made me cry, and only held me back from facing the reality that I spent my childhood tracking how unsafe my life was while he had the luxury of tracking a child’s body instead.