TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 160

[Tobie Shapiro]

February 23, 20000007


Dear You who matter,

	I hear Feyna downstairs, snurfing through 
her raisin bran.  She's a bit in the dumps, 
because she didn't get the job.  And the bad part 
is that she owes me a lot of money.  She owes her 
friends some money, too.  Never a good idea to 
owe friends money.  I have carefully avoided ever 
owing anyone I know any money.   I deal with the 
bank, but no friends or family.

	Shortly after villainman walked out, I 
met, through Craig's list, a man who billed 
himself as, "Good Guy".  When we met, he told me 
he was in dire financial straits, and was waiting 
on a big big payment by a client that had skinned 
him for his services.  He was a head hunter for 
large businesses.  He swore by the profession, 
even though it wasn't doing him much good.  Good 
Guy, with his stories of pathetic situations, got 
me to loan him thirty dollars for a tank of gas 
(remember thirty bucks for a tank of gas?), and 
then two hundred here for car repair, fifty there 
for paying the rent.  He even hornswoggled me 
into going to the automatic teller machine and 
drawing out two hundred dollars for him for some 
reason or another.  He did this by saying that he 
had to go to the ATM, and when we got there, he 
explained that it was for me to get money for 
him.  Feyna was sitting in the car, and I didn't 
want to expose her to a scene about money, so I 
did it.

	All in all, Good Guy eventually owed me 
round about a thousand clams.  And he swore he 
would pay it back.  Of course.  Now, I am not 
blaming Good Guy for making me a victim; I was 
there agreeing and letting him take advantage of 
me.  I sort of did it to myself.  For a while we 
lost contact.  Then I saw him listed on Jdate 
with Good Guy as his name, and professing to make 
over a hundred thousand dollars a year.  So I 
called him.  "Business is good?" I asked him. 
No.  He told me he was as broke as a Greek plate. 
So I said, maybe he should adjust his profile on 
Jdate.  Uh oh.  Well, yes, maybe he should do 
that, he admitted.  But it didn't change.  I 
watched for that.  After a while, I e-mailed him 
telling him that his income needed to be 
adjusted.  I knew he'd want to be honest.  He 
wrote back saying that things were looking 
better.  The recruitment business had picked up. 
So I suggested that he think about paying me back 
the thousand dollars.  He readily agreed.  He 
would send it in the mail.  But it didn't arrive. 
I called him.  I said that I really needed that 
money.  I was borrowing money from my mother 
every month just to get by, and since he was 
doing well, couldn't he pay me back now.  I was 
afraid to demand my money back, because I didn't 
want to lose what little friend I had in him, 
which was all illusion, and I knew it.  After I 
made my request, I never heard from him again.  I 
wrote a couple times, but he didn't write back. 
I haven't bothered berating him for his 
behaviour.  When I loaned him money, each time I 
repeated to myself that I would only lend him 
money if I expected never to get a penny back. 
And at least I was right about something.




 
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Dear Abby

	After my mother didn't believe me that my 
father had touched my breasts while I was 
sleeping, I suffered a loss of trust.  And this 
was no simple thing.  She was the only parent I 
had, really, since I couldn't count my father. 
Therefore, I had to cling to her as the only port 
in a storm.  But now she had betrayed me twice. 
The first was in telling my father what I'd said 
since I'd begged her not to.  The second was in 
colluding with him not to believe me.  This set 
off a series of calamities, demonstrations of the 
damage done me.  I suffered obviously, tearfully, 
neurotically.  I went into long seclusions where 
I would cry for days on end.  And I was 
depressed.  I talked about suicide, though nobody 
took much note.  I was evidently dramatic and 
when I was a tad upset, they could expect such 
talk from me.  The truth is I had no where to go 
but my mother, and now my mother didn't feel safe 
to me.  I could no longer trust her to keep a 
secret or believe me about important matters, 
life altering events.  It made me crazy, and 
that's what I thought I was going.

	Looking back on things, I see it in 
another light as well.  The shows of depressions, 
the catatonia, the wounded animal acts, were all 
ways of pleading with my mother:

	"Now do you believe me?"

	"What about now with the catatonia?"

	"How about if I talk about suicide?  Will you believe me then?"

	I put a lot of hope and anger into my 
thrashing.  It was a way of expressing my fury 
and of convincing her that I'd been honest. 
There was no other person I could go to.  I knew 
not to take my troubles to my grandparents.  I 
think I was afraid to lose them, too, if they 
didn't believe me.  That was something I wouldn't 
survive.  Also, there was an unspoken imperative 
not to let out the family secrets.  I am doing 
that now, and God knows why.  Maybe I'm just 
tired of keeping everything to myself.  Maybe 
it's a phase, something my parents would mention 
whenever I acted up.  "Maybe it's a phase."  I 
stewed and suffered in my own bewildered 
bereavement.  And even though there were 
subconscious psychological motivations for my 
behaviour, the behaviour expressed authentic 
grief.  I was in a state of grief.

	From that time on, I never confided in my 
mother again, if it required trust in her 
believing me.  I shut her out.  It is still the 
only thing we cannot talk about: my father and 
his effect on me.  She saw all three of her 
children grow up being experimented on by him, 
and she saw that every one of us had terrible 
trouble with him.  But she steadfastly ignored 
it, made it smaller than it was, less 
consequential.  Without my mother believing me, I 
was desperate for someone to believe me.  So I 
wrote a letter to Dear Abby.  I described the 
awful scene that night when I'd awakened to find 
my father's hand on my breast, and I told her to 
be extra sensitive because I was telling her 
things I couldn't tell my own mother.  I asked 
her what to do.  I folded the letter, slid it 
carefully into an envelope, addressed the 
envelope according to the instructions in the 
Chronicle, and put the letter in the stack of 
letters that were meant to be mailed.

	I waited for a response.  I waited some 
more for a response.  I'm sure I wasn't allowing 
enough time.  How many confessions a week did the 
poor woman receive?  Would she even read my 
letter, or would it wind up in a pile of 
discards?  If she read it, would she answer me? 
I'd requested that she not have it printed in the 
paper.  Would she print it anyway?  I watched the 
column, but nothing appeared, not even in the, 
"CONFIDENTIAL TO UNHAPPY IN CLEVELAND:" section.

	I gave up.

	It must have been a couple of months 
before a letter arrived that had the return 
address of, "Dear Abby".  Before I could get to 
it, my father snatched it up.  "This is for me," 
he said, hunching over in his guilty posture and 
turning red in the face as he smiled at me.

	A sinking feeling.  Something not right 
was happening, but I couldn't figure out what. 
Did my father intercept a letter from Abby meant 
for me?  Or had he intercepted the original 
letter I sent to Abby, and stolen it away to 
write his own letter to her?  Where had my 
original letter actually wound up?  I cringed to 
imagine him reading it, off in his study, tearing 
it up, and writing a letter to Abby himself about 
his thirteen year old daughter who was wrongly 
accusing him of molestation.  But why, if he'd 
intercepted my original letter, did he need to 
write to Abby at all?  What would have been the 
point?  Then maybe he was confiscating a letter 
from Abby meant for me.  But how would he know to 
confiscate it if he hadn't read my original 
letter?  Had he read my letter to Abby, then 
sealed it again and mailed it along with his own 
rebuttal?  Why bother doing that?  I went round 
and round with my questions, and they didn't stop 
with their convoluted logic and dire implications.

	There was no one to confide in about 
this.  No one.  So eventually, I gave up.  I 
never found out anything about the episode.  It 
has remained a mystery all my life.



 
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Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net