Loose Roots

She’s like an aunt, but actually, she’s my mother’s best friend. As soon as we are dismissed, I rush to the pick-up curb and look for Evelyn’s pink Cadillac. It’s easy to spot. I hope my classmates see me as I slide into her cool car, headed out for a girls-on- the-town kinda afternoon.

Evelyn gives me a coral-pink kiss and asks, “How about we get a bite?”

Sitting at Burger Mountain Soda Fountain, I am sucking down a chocolate shake and enjoying my cheeseburger, while Evelyn examines the movie section of the paper spread out before us.

“How about “Saturday Night Fever? It’s at the dollar theater,” I say in the most casual way.

“Darlin, don’t you think that might be a bit too grown up for a 10-year-old?”

“It’s just about dancing,” I say. “Saw it on HBO already. You’ll love it.”

“Well, if you say so,” she says, sliding off her pointy reading glasses and rolling up the paper.

We get settled in with all the goodies—red hots, popcorn, and cola—and my head spins watching John, playing Danny in his white suit, slide across the lighted disco. Evelyn sits beside me, kicking her heels to the beat. But it doesn’t take long until a scene unravels that neither of us sees coming.

Having left the club and piled into a car, Annette is trying to make Danny jealous by flirting with a boy in the backseat, but he wants sex that she won’t give, so he takes it, and she cries under him. “Your turn,” the bad guy says to Double J, who trades places and does the same thing. Right about then, Evelyn has me up and is dragging me out of the theatre by the elbows. 
On the way home, as the street lights race across our windshield, I assure Evelyn those parts were not in the version on HBO, but larger questions take hold. Could that have been my birth mother’s story? Could I have been forced like that into my birth mother’s clinched belly? Is that how I came to be?

For a year the fear of being a product of rape tortured me, but in time, I let it go. But as puberty struck, I began to feel the weight of something wild, terrific, and terrifying in my hands, the powerful reins of my budding sexuality. And like Annette, I’d giddy up fast, hoping to lasso my worth in the eyes of boys and the hands of men.

Two months after my 15th birthday, an 18-year-old boy named Rusty took me to a Mardi Gras parade. Before long, we were on the beach in the back of a station wagon drunk and stoned. When he became too wasted to perform, I’d laughed, and it was then Rusty jumped out the back and started yelling “Who Wants to Get Fucked” at two men walking by.

In an instant, one of them climbed atop me. The putrid smell of vomit on his breath, compelled me to push away before fear convinced me to lay back down. When he was done, the next man climbed on, pushing into where the other had been. Hours later, I woke up in my driveway, half undressed, stinking of booze, pot, and fluids of nasty men. Where was the little girl in that movie theater with Evelyn? Just like Annette, I’d teased Rusty all night. I must have deserved it.

If you’d asked me then what the “it” was, I’d have told you the “it” was me. Date rape. Gang rape. My body had felt those words, but my ears had never heard them. Like my birth mother, wild weed, or broken wildflower, I thought my loose roots were to blame.

Thirty years later I’d meet my birth mother. “Sorry, but you're the product of rape,” she'd say as casually as one picks lint off their sweater. Yet, being an unwed mother in the 1960s was the only shame I detected. Her eyes betrayed her, and I knew better.