Angry Daughter I
An explanation.
I’ve decided to write a personal essay series attempting to explain why, as many secondhand thinkers have asked me, ‘I am the way that I am.’ And critically, why I am an ‘angry daughter.’ This is the first essay in the series.
I’m either eleven or twelve, I can’t recall perfectly. But I do remember the smoky curl of the gray, overcast sky, the noxious contrast of the neighborhood development’s California mission-style terracotta plaster. All these houses are so ugly, I think.
It’s a weird, out-of-character agreement for my mom: I’ll stay with my sister while she hangs out with her friend in this house, my mom will run errands or whatever it is she does when she doesn’t need to hover over us, and then she’ll come pick us up. A few hours, she says, and drives off.
It’s clear from the start that my sister does not want me there. Her and the girl she’s friends with, allegedly - I’m pretty sure her and this particular girl were in a mean girl spat less than a couple months before - disappear into the girl’s room upstairs. When I try to join, the door closes pointedly in my face. I try to sit down in the den - why is there never a shortage of these over-stuffed, gross black-sheen slick leather couches in Desi houses - and pass the time. The girl’s brother, a year or so younger than me, invites me to hang out with him. And so I follow, trying to be less of a burden and maybe, cool (?) for being a girl hanging out with a boy, to an audience of none.
We end up outside at first, in the backyard, throwing a foam football back and forth under the stifling sky. He tells me he hates his sister, too, she’s a ‘fugly bitch’ who plays a second mom and never lets him do anything fun. I laugh louder than I should, partly because I feel the same and partly because I’ve never heard anyone my age cuss like that before.
This family, this boy and his sister, are part of our community, a tightly wound pack of Pakistani families cooing at each other in middle school gymnasiums on the weekend, saving their pointed jabs and shitty comments about each other’s kids for the patchwork of living rooms they pass through during the week. Critically, gender-mixing between said children is frowned upon, discouraged. So maybe I’ve never heard anyone say ‘fugly bitch’ out loud because the girls I’m around launch into a bomb fallout scenario if a girl in the group errantly says ‘hell.’
But either way - I laugh, probably too loud and too expressively. And it’s then, for the first time that day, that the boy lunges forward and hits me, hard, with an open hand directly into my face. I stagger backward, he spikes the football in the ground and scrambles on top of me. He keeps trying to slap my face with both hands, his knees on either side of my torso. I manage to swat his hands away, finding some unearthly force to place both of my hands square on his chest and heave him off of me. He gets up, laughing, saying he totally won. I’m not sure what’s happened, or what game we were even playing, but I feel the sting of blood seeping through my front teeth.
I find a bathroom in the house - why is it so empty in here? where is everyone? - and rinse my mouth until the water runs clear. I look at my face - a small red slit in the bottom left of my lower lip has started to erupt. I think about how it’s a miracle that my glasses are still intact.
I tiptoe out of the bathroom and up the stairs to find my sister. Her and the boy’s sister - the fugly bitch - are sitting on opposite sides of the bedroom, talking and doing nothing. I close the door and sit down on the floor behind it, smiling to avoid the lump rising in my throat. My sister stops talking, turns to look at me. Her face changes in an instant - the chatty demeanor dropping into an icy, vacant stare - and she asks what the fuck I’m doing in here. I tell her I just wanted to hang, and she says no, absolutely not, and before I can register it or plead with her to just talk with me for a second, away from the fugly bitch - she’s grabbed my arm, yanked me off of the carpet and into the hall. The door slam shuts a second time, and an echo of laughter follows from behind it.
I sit there for a moment, attempting to slow my open-mouthed breathing, listening to the creaks of this house. Listening for footsteps. Hearing none, I pick my way downstairs and find the wall phone in the kitchen, dialing my mom’s cellphone. It rings, and rings, and goes to voicemail. I ask her to please, come get me right away.
The boy emerges into the kitchen, asking if I want to play video games. I stare for a moment, trying to register if he sees that I’m injured, or acknowledge that he just tackled me to the ground. His face is blank, serene. And so I think, maybe - if I sit far enough away, I can get through some of this time playing video games.
Upstairs, back on the faux sticky couches in the den, my Mario Kart skills are failing as I try to keep one eye on the brother and an ear out for the doorbell, signaling that my mom is here to get me. On the second Grand Prix, where I lose spectacularly, my focus slips for a moment and I miss the chance to move away when he launches himself at me again, plastering me against the fart-addled cushions of this disgusting couch. This time, he raises a controller, and I move my head just in time for the edge to hit my ear instead of square onto my glasses. This demon is laughing, saying I need to fight back, don’t I know this is how girls get raped? Get torn apart by strangers?
He grabs my wrist when he says this, laughing, digging his nails into my skin. I wait until his laughter slows long enough for his stomach to slacken, and I drive my knee up, hard. He flings backward with a yelp, which sends the fugly bitch, and my sister, mercifully, running out of the bedroom. Fugly bitch asks what’s going on, and he says I hurt him even though we were just messing around. I look up at my sister, pleading, and she stares back at me, angry.
‘Why are you being so weird? Just be fucking normal!’ she says to me. She takes fugly bitch back into the room. The brother is now crouching on the ground, facing away from me. I slip back down the stairs to the kitchen, and finally get a hold of my mom on the wall phone. She says she’ll be there soon, and hangs up.
I hide in the downstairs bathroom, in this painfully quiet house, for an hour. When no doorbell chimes, I slip out and call my mom again. She says she’s coming.
I do this twice, maybe three times, I can’t be sure. One of the longest stretches of my memory I can recall is lying on the bathroom tile, starting at my wrist, the scratch of half-moon marks blooming angrily in red and pink.
After what has to be more than four hours, the doorbell chimes. I haul myself up, attempting to walk coolly past the auntie that has reappeared after hours of being fuck-all nowhere. Her and my mom exchange pleasantries as I tuck myself under my mom’s arm, she calls for my sister, and we finally, finally, are back in the solitude of her car.
There, I start crying so loudly it’s half a scream. My mom looks at me in terror at first and then in anger, asking me what the problem is, what happened. I tell her, the brother hit me, hit me in the face, pinned me down, laughed at me. She examines me, turns to my sister - who looks at my mom and shrugs, biting her lip hard so she doesn’t laugh - and then back to me.
‘He’s just horsing around. That’s how boys play. Why are you so upset about it?’ My mom asks. I sob, almost screaming, that I called her and called and she didn’t come. Why didn’t she come?
She ignores me, saying I’m being hysterical, that nothing’s wrong with me. And if I didn’t want to play, why didn’t I just stop? I’m a big girl. Why didn’t I just go and find my sister? Why am I acting like this? I need to stop crying, stop being a baby about it. Nothing’s wrong, nobody did anything wrong. I’m fine. Stop crying. Stop crying, GOD. STOP CRYING. I’M GOING TO LOSE MY MIND IN THIS GODFORSAKEN HOUSE STOP CRYING.
I swallow the heaves coming out of my throat for the rest of the car ride. When we’re home, I barely make it upstairs and puke in the bathroom I share with my sister. I cry silently, or try to, jamming myself between the cool porcelain of the toilet and the door frame. The shaking stops, eventually, but I’ve learned. To stay quiet, to play along, to not disrupt. Do not look for help. The boys make the rules. They have the final say.
I’m twenty-nine now, exactly eight months away from my thirtieth birthday. I’ve never written about this. I don’t think I’ve ever actually talked about it.
But the fear I felt that day was like nothing I’d experienced before. And it’s odd, terrifying really, that I can still recall exactly what the shock of being struck so hard felt like to this day. And then waves that followed: asking for help, asking my mom to please, please, come and get me, being told it didn’t happen, I was exaggerating, my sister was there, of course that couldn’t have happened.
The cold, searing grip of that shock has never fully left me. But I’m going to keep writing these until the tap runs out. Maybe there’s a freer person on the other side.
