BEANSTALK and other shorts

Priestess of Secrets

Some secrets are easy to keep. They don’t impact you. You toss them down into the well and forget anyone ever told you. I learned to do this in my teens, when my father started telling me too much about his sex life.

Father was always the one I could talk to. He was the one with emotions. Tell him something with feeling attached, and he would respond with feeling. Not that he wouldn’t run and tell Mom right away, and judgment would surely follow. But for a moment, I’d been listened to. I had experienced empathy.

So when Dad started telling me things, I responded with empathy, too. When he dropped his voice and drew me out of the hallway into the downstairs bathroom, I prepared to drop everything I knew. Forget that this man is your enemy. Forget that he makes the rules and slaps you when you break them.  Forget the spankings with dresses upturned, in front of your brothers. This is something so secret he isn’t even telling Mommy. This is a big responsibility.

It was decades before I understood that his kind of confidences weren’t healthy. I was 40 before a therapist first spoke the words ‘emotional incest.’ But I did know that secrets were humiliating, and dangerous, and you shouldn’t let them out of your hands any more than you’d walk around slashing with a carving knife..

Secrets got you spanked. Secrets got you fired. Secrets got you divorced, in the headlines and then in jail. Secrets damaged people.

Not me. I was the priestess of secrets. It ennobled me, made me the ultimate insider and confidante. People tell secrets because they can do nothing else. Someone has to be told before it eats its way out through their skin and leaves black tumors. Telling is the only cure. I was the deep black holy well into which strangers and lovers poured their misery. I was the ultimate repository: Once you told me ‘this is a secret,’ I almost forgot I knew it. Sometimes three people would tell me the same clandestine tale, yet I was always surprised and fascinated.

            I had no secrets of my own, that was the trick. Ask me about anything you want, I would tell you. It’s not that I never did anything wrong, or embarrassing. I guess I just never took it personally. I was human. I had done this stupid thing. Ha, ha, wasn’t that funny? Can you believe I did that? What was I thinking?

You see, I grew up having no secrets. My body language was simple, and I had a mobile face. My thoughts and my guilts were easy to read, and were punished accordingly. And I had two inquisitive brothers who couldn’t wait to tell on me.  My diary, no matter where I hid it, made the rounds as regularly as Newsweek. It even got quoted back to me. So I learned that nothing was mine, not even the inside of my head. Better, much better, to tell the story oneself, and control its presentation – maybe give it a little spin.

But a day is coming, I know it, when I will do something cunning, something sticky, something that creeps up my fingers like mold.

Then I, too, will have to find a priestess.