Walled Women ISSUE 1: Voices Against Sexual Violence

Dad’s a secret keeper. His is a cavernous capacity for shame dug in a violent childhood. Even other
people’s ignominy is held deep and cool and sacred. Vigilance leaves no energy for apologies. I don’t hold
them responsible, but I’ve since witnessed the apology made on behalf of tenderness. I see my father pick
up this new sorrow without relieving me of my share, neither of us aware it can go any differently.
Another memory: the priest visits, headed to a retreat deep in the Adirondacks. A young woman, Mary—
how old? I am maybe four, every tall person seems autonomous—accompanies him as his assistant. The
next visit, one of us asks after her.
Who? says Father Jim.
Pre-molestation: the priest sleeps over a weekend. He watches television with my sister while I make
pancakes and coffee in the kitchen, make conversation in the living room and run back and forth while the
parents, upstairs, sleep. A news bulletin of a fire shows a woman talking to a reporter. She’s lost her home.
“Smoking a cigarette, disgusting,” says Father Jim. My brother repeats it later, disgusted with the priest. My
good Catholic brother... I don’t remember him there.
(In that antique house, so many doors, endless alcoves—from the Arabic for ‘vault’—the house disorients,
swallows, spits us out at unexpected exits).
I do remember: feeling smart, discussing philosophy with a priest—until I smell burnt pancakes, blackened
sausages, feel my throat go raw and through the smoke the acrid slap of his disappointment at a ruined
breakfast.
Cheesy move, the change drop, handful of silver and all that. At 11, or 10, I know that to acknowledge his
shower of coins
(limited to what is in his pocket, so brief a rain, and what is that even to say, that there is some more impressive
gesture? But yes, a compounded insult, attempting to shut me up with nickels and dimes, any shiny sum
reparation enough, any linty offering sufficient to sop the shame of abuse by someone so cheap and stupid, who
thought me cheap—but couldn’t trust me to be stupid—no pretense, even, no peeling off a bill or two, for, say,
my music lessons...no, just a sweaty palmful of loose change)
is an act of self-implication, that by rules I can't source, to take his money—or to leave it on the dresser,
untouched, as he walks away—transfers responsibility to my own felt shoulders. He is afraid, even outside
the dark cloak of the Church, and utterly unfingerable.
Why in God’s name not? my mother demands, and he’s a guest at my twelfth birthday party.
She’s too fat for it, he says about the rabbit fur jacket my mother gifts me. It hurt but trust my critically chic
mother to reject fashion tips from a guy in a short-sleeved button-down black shirt with rectory buzz cut.
She looks cheap, he says, and she has me take it off. He’d figured it out, dim as he was. All he
had to do was hate me, and he was safe.
Irene Cooper is the author of Committal, a speculative spy-fy novel from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, and spare change, a poetry collection from Finishing
Line Press. Irene also co-edits The Stay Project. Poems, stories and reviews appear both online and in print.
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