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Show Moon -155 Have I perversely resented Josh for not wanting to use me as they did? I sit up and lift the corner of the sheet to my face as if I might smell a memory I can use. Did I really think that sleeping with someone like the man called Daddy would turn me into a person who could love? It's as if all those years of hearing James cry, "You don't love me," translated into the idea that I couldn't love anyone until I loved him on his terms. James-whom I've insisted on forgiving with blind baby love-has held me in thrall, kept me locked up, kept me ugly, embraceable by no one. Here I sit naked in the bed of stranger because I think I'm too hideous for love. Here, then, is the focus of the hot fire, the rage that has had nowhere to go but inside, and I've been burning, burning unto ashes on the snow. Surely James-my stepfather, the only father I knew, Daddy-lay like John sometimes and in the silence of night knew he was not as hard as he pretended to be, was not a man who could fill a woman with love. Daddy, it never was my job to help you! May God forgive you. I'm wondering how soon I can leave this ice-green room and not be rude to this unsuspecting stranger with his own needs for forgiveness. I dress in a hurry, unable to prevent that unkindness, and sit down on the bed, wait for him to come out of the shower. He finally comes to me, wrapped in a towel, takes my hand. He says, "I'm sorry." I take these simple words into myself like light, as if I'm a leaf on a tree. I let them mean far more than they do, as if James himself were saying, for different reasons, those words, "I'm sorry," I've needed so long to hear. If Td done a womanly job with John, licked and kneaded him into sexual completion, he would instead be saying, "Thank you." This man tried to give me |
