sexual assault

By Lisa Coppola

That evening Ma ate clumsily from a bag of cheese curls, and the orange dust caked on her fingers; crumbs hung from stray hairs on her chin. Her left eyebrow tensed with each dramatic revelation the show brought. The episode was about the reunification of a mother and son after decades apart. They fell into each other’s arms, and I became as tense as a pole. My heart sped up, and a hard lump formed in my throat. I remembered the box in the upstairs closet labeled, “The clothes Lisa came in,” as though I’d been purchased in a store—a real human doll with a blank slate background. “I never stopped thinking about you,” said the mother on tv. Tears escaped from my eyes. I wondered aloud over the years but had never asked the actual question.

“So Ma, what do you actually, really, know about my birth mother?

She looked at me, one hazel eye lifted slightly. She breathed in carefully, turned to me, and switched off the tv.

“Well, her name was Margaret. Your name before we got you was Libby. But we thought you were more of a Lisa.”

My cheeks flushed.

“Libby? Like short for something, like Elizabeth? Lisa’s better anyway.”

“Nope, just Libby. Margaret was mentally ill; we know she lived for a while in the State Hospital. Also, we know that she may have been raped—or something.”

Raped—or something? A tremble tightened in the pit of my stomach.

“By who? Who raped her?”

“It may have been another patient. They didn’t tell us much.”

She sounded a bit too removed.

“Seriously? Really? That’s really nuts, huh?”

I reached for an Oreo out of the tin Dad kept on the coffee table and casually ate it while my hand shook from the adrenaline.

“We tried to find out more after we got you but they gave us very little information.”

I steadied myself onto my feet and moments later found myself in the bathroom. I leaned onto the sides of the sink and peered closely into the mirror to study my nineteen-year-old face, a typical daily practice. That night it came with more information. My intense blue eyes stared back at me and I tried to see what was in there, what kind of entity I even was. Probably human I figured. As a kid, I thought the mysterious indentation on top of my skull could have been where I was released from a port when the ship dropped me off. My reflection continued to stare back at me like a stranger. Ma was not the type to fuss about her looks or to diet like many of my friend’s dieting mothers, which the feminist part of me appreciated. Still, with no biological guide to help me know what I may have been growing into, I had to look to magazines and media and tried to sort out what kind of woman I may be destined to look like. My frame was a thin hourglass shape. Magazines told me this was acceptable, but also told me that thinner would be better. I had full lips. I was not necessarily pretty; I was not cute. I was sexy. I was a hot girl, but I wanted to be beautiful. Sexy and hot got you noticed, got you chosen from a crowd, got you sought after for a moment. Beautiful, however, got you kept. At that point, I was living out the role of a sexy and disturbed girl that sometimes got herself into trouble.

Daring to peer even closer, I tried to see both the rapist in me and then the mentally ill woman in me and wondered which parts come from whom. Questions arose: What kind of mental illness did Margaret have? Could she be scary, like my brother Simon? Or,  was she more like me, either lost in daydreams or stuck in annoying obsessive thought cycles? Maybe Margaret would understand my quirks. Then, the first of what would be daily visions played out in my head. A woman’s mouth struggling to open smothered by a gnarly hand, her head pushed into the plastic covering on a hospital mattress. What did it mean to exist only because a woman was raped?

This inquiry was big, too big to fathom. Doubt reserved a dingy backseat in my brain and whispered to me. Perhaps it wasn’t. Maybe she lied, maybe they were in love. Maybe she was religious and lied because of her faith. Or, maybe it wasn’t a patient. Maybe it was a doctor or a counselor, someone who could take advantage of a mentally ill woman living in a hospital. The man was a looming dark shadow, standing tall and hovering and faceless. I only existed because of a bad seed.

I left the bathroom that night and paused to look at the wooden doghouse that hung off the wall in our kitchen. It had been there for as long as I could remember. Five small dog pieces, each about two inches tall, and each had one of our names written on the front: Ma, Dad, Russell, Lisa, and Simon.* Dad’s dog was a bit taller than the rest; Ma’s was plump and smiling. My older brother Russ’s dog was scuffed up and guilty, his big black eyes pointed up to the right. Simon’s dog looked out of place, like a different breed—a terrier perhaps. Mine shined with innocence, wide-eyed and floppy eared. For many years, when one of us kids got into trouble, Ma would announce our dog’s move into the doghouse. It didn’t happen too often for me. Simon was occasionally in there for ignoring her. It was Russ whose dog was always hanging in there and it still was in there that night. As though I was in a kind of visceral trance, I walked up to the doghouse, moved Russ out, and moved my dog in.

*Names have been changed in the interest of privacy.

Lisa Coppola is an adoptee advocate and creator of the Voices Unheard Speaker Series, which is put on through Boston Post Adoption Resources. She lives in the Boston area and is working on a memoir about healing from sexual trauma and tracking down both of her biological parents. Look for her blog, visit her author page on Facebook, and find her on Instagram @morethanjustaluckyadoptee.

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