Memory Lapse

Carrie Albert

Word Count 2058

One day, while on the phone with my older brother, I brought up our vacation in Mexico when I was 19, he was 26 and our other brother who went was 21. 

He said, “I traveled to Mexico, but you didn’t come with me.”

I became angry and said,“How can you forget I was there too? People don’t forget things like that.” 

I’d had many years of counseling before I gained the courage to begin to confront him about our history. I was in search of healing. Like many who have experienced sexual abuse, I wanted apologies. If he wouldn’t even acknowledge my presence, how could I expect anything more? As if my trip to Mexico was all a dream, he was absolutely certain that I didn’t go.

With my family, I was quiet, stepped lightly, often melted into walls of invisibility. I didn’t feel safe when in the limelight. I also grew up feeling that I was never enough, and that I was much weaker than anyone in my family. I had been a sweet child, but that trait may have been learned. As the youngest and the only girl with three big brothers, I was like one of those girl dogs who sink onto the ground when confronted by dominant male dogs, because those who are passive, who play dead, don’t get harmed, right? 

At age 19, I was afraid to tell my family that I didn't want to go on a summer vacation with two of my brothers. I would be asked why I didn't want to see Mexico, to stay for free at the lavish house with the maid service, the deliveries of pure bottled water. The younger brother and I were on summer breaks from college. The older brother would be starting medical school in the fall. The acceptance of my family and their expectations mattered more than the fear I felt to my core about being alone with my brothers. I chose to prove that I wasn’t a wimpy girl. I was also not very good at saying no.

My brother’s friend, Barry, who lived in the house in Guadalajara, attended medical school there. I never met Barry because he was already away on his own vacation. We had his place to ourselves. We each had our own bedroom upstairs. The first night, in the kitchen downstairs, our conversation grew intimate. 

Both brothers said they hoped to meet Mexican girls and get laid. Then the younger said he would have sex with me if I was willing. I didn’t answer. I was shocked and yet I wasn’t.

I knew that I was headed for trouble on the trip with my brothers, but after hearing this I was inwardly terrified. 

This led the older brother to reveal incestuous acts in my bed that he committed when I was little girl. He said he almost “did it” to me and, “You didn’t seem to mind. Don’t you remember?” I said that I didn’t.

Before this confession, I hadn’t any memory that he also had sexually abused me. He then told me that Johnnie, the boy his age who lived across the street from us, encouraged him to “go all the way” with me, but that he never actually did. Much later, I found out from my younger brother that my older brother’s sexual abuses began when I was an infant. That night in Mexico, I didn’t even ask how old I was or how many times? The older brother said he knew this would happen during our trip.

Why did he confess this? That night, I felt like maybe the older brother wanted to have sex with me also. He wasn’t defending or protecting me from the younger brother in any way. It was like two against me. They wanted to get laid. If not a Mexican girl, then the sister who was right there might be available?  

Boundaries didn't mean anything – back then we didn’t know what they were. That night, I was silent, numb, as if invisible hands squeezed my throat. Besides fight or flight, there is another reaction to danger: freeze. To freeze creates a surface of calm. I acted nonchalant, and then I left the room shaking. I knew I had to get away from them in a hurry before their desires escalated. Pretending I didn’t care, exhibiting calm and retreating quickly was how I escaped other sexual abuses in my childhood.

My brothers must have assumed that I wouldn’t seek help from our parents because they never got in trouble before. When much older and after counseling, I learned that victims of incest often engage superficially and continue to fulfill expected roles with family. Our conversations are disingenuous because family acceptance demands silence. As an adult looking at my childhood drawings, I’ve noticed that just the female figures were always without hands, arms or fingers. In other words, without agency or self-defense. To tell on my brother would upset the family, like overturning a tea kettle of scalding water. The person mostly to get burned was me.

 I didn’t consider calling my parents that night because I was afraid of my Dad, uncertain of his reaction, and I didn’t believe my mom would prove helpful to me. She was often dismissive and didn’t want to hear about things that bothered me. I thought that telling might destroy my relationship with everyone in my family; I might even be blamed. I never wanted or sought the sexual advances of my brothers and, for as far back as I could recall, I had used my powers to prevent it. The sexual abuses went far beyond words to include intimate touching and scary bodily exposures. But as far as I could recall, I wasn’t raped. I chose to consider it harassment rather than the abuse it was. 

I convinced myself that I could handle them on my own as I always had. I didn’t realize that my central nervous system suffered badly from so many years of being on guard. I developed PTSD, anorexia, anxiety disorder and many other physical and emotional damages common to trauma victims. 

The next day in Guadalajara, as if that late night conversation had never happened, my brothers and I went to an outdoor market where shoppers bargained over prices. While there, we met some locals, young men, who were going to a beach town and invited us to come. The older brother didn't trust them. He had his important plans. The future for the younger brother and I was uncertain; we didn’t have so much to lose. We left the older brother in Guadalajara. Before we got on the bus, he warned me about Mexican men with leering eyes. 

After a long bus ride, we disembarked in a small town, decidedly not a tourist attraction. There were pigs grazing in front of cottage size houses. The front yards were small with flimsy fences. I never tasted fish as fresh. I tried the mango popsicles, but not the peyote offered by our new companions. To avoid the scorching heat, they went indoors, where one of them lived, for a siesta until evening. The house was cool but dark with the curtains closed, and I wasn’t sleepy. 

My brother wanted to go swimming in the ocean. Our new friends warned about rip currents, but I followed my brother into the water anyway because I wanted to swim, and I didn’t want to be left alone with the young men I didn’t know.

My brother swam like a giant sea turtle with a smooth shell who goes where the waves want to go; he floated away from sight. I found myself caught in the rip currents. Each time I swam to escape the waves, I was pounded, dragged back. This had never happened before. It wasn’t like the ocean in Santa Cruz or Carmel, California where I swam on other vacations. I didn’t know that despite how it feels, the rip currents themselves will not make you drown. The best method of escape is to swim farther out in the ocean beyond their pull and/or to try to swim parallel to shore until you pass where the currents end. 

I kept swimming to the beach – and the ocean kept sucking me back out away from shore. I screamed for help. No one walking along the beach heard or noticed. My brother wasn’t anywhere in sight. I did everything wrong. I panicked. But my panic gave me the strength to fight for my life. I finally had just enough muscle to escape the relentless pull of the waters. I raced up onto the land. Gritty sand clung to my skin and hair – sand had filled my swimsuit and attached inside every orifice.

Shortly after that, I met my brother on the beach. He had a pleasant swim and had no trouble returning to shore a distance away. Somehow, he had entirely avoided the rip currents. Perhaps because he had a pleasant swim, he couldn’t comprehend that his sister had almost drowned?

Some dangers, like rip currents, are fierce and life threatening. The dangers of incest for me took place in a boat of belonging in a family. I thought I was in control; it was just harassment, I could manage. It was a slow drowning.

That day, after beating the ocean currents, I was grateful to return to the dark house where the Mexican friends were still taking their siesta. I didn’t leave the bedroom our companions had offered me until the sun rose the next morning. My younger brother decided that he wanted to continue traveling in Mexico. My older brother was waiting for us in Guadalajara to take the plane back to California, and I was ready to go home. 

On the bus returning to Guadalajara on my own, I met a co-ed group of young friends who lived in Mexico City. The bus took us through the vast metropolis that seemed endless, vaster than any city I had ever seen. The group invited me to get off the bus with them to go to a restaurant for lunch. They spoke to me in English, and I tried out the Spanish that I had studied in college. They told me that sometimes they played strip poker which seemed odd because two of the men were to become priests. 

One of the priests-to-be sat between me and his girlfriend. He had big brown eyes and a sweet baby face. He leaned over to me and whispered, “Would you like to go have sex?” This proposition was exactly what my brothers hoped to find for themselves in Mexico. I was practiced at escaping sexual advances that I didn’t want. I lied to him that maybe we could if we were in the United States, but I couldn’t do it there, and he accepted that. I felt sorry for his girlfriend. Recently, I ran across a photo I asked the waiter to take of our group seated outdoors dining at a long table. 

After lunch, they took me back to the bus. This was 1978 and long before cell phones. Somehow I met my older brother in Guadalajara. We were friendly, but I kept a distance and didn’t have anymore conversations about anything of significance. When we flew back to California, I especially recall the airport in L.A. because I viewed Americans differently. They looked so big, over-fed, insulated from Mexico and the rest of the world, and weren’t friendly like the Mexicans I met.

My trip to Mexico was not a dream. In time, my older brother admitted that I was there too. But I wouldn’t again confront him about anything.

I’ve often wondered how the younger brother escaped the rip currents? He easily rolled back onto the beach, yet I barely survived. Those many years ago, I also confronted him, separately from the older brother. He told me that he thought his sexual behaviors towards me were justified because men naturally want sex. I never received the heartfelt apology I wanted from him, but he wasn’t completely a closed door. Eventually, he said he understood how I felt because he would go out to his garden late at night with his flashlight to pull slugs off of his dahlias and tender green vegetables, his vulnerable darlings.

Carrie finds healing and beauty in both words and visual arts. She has undergraduate degrees in English and Art from the University of Washington and currently continues her studies at Path with Art where she also volunteers. Her poems have recently been published in Anti-Heroin Chic, Gyroscope Review, The Ekphrastic Review and Bird Brains: A Lyrical Guide to Washington State Birds; sculptures were included in exhibitions at Ghost Gallery, Lynn Hanson Gallery and Bryn Mawr Rehab Hospital. She lives in Seattle with her papier-mâché animals.