Stealing Consent: My First Visit With My Sister

Coincidentally, I was reading "Lolita" just before I took my first trip back to Berkeley to visit my sister. So when Eric reccomended it I was surprised he had heard of the book. I thought it was some obscure thing that I had mined from the lyrics of a Rock and Roll song.

In the Police song "Don't Stand So Close To Me" I heard the line "just like that old man in that book by Nabokov." I listened to the lyric until I had the pronunciation well enough to look it up and bought a copy. I had already read it once but I thought I would read it again while I was in Berkeley. My impression of the story that first time I read it was a good one. I thought it was a story about a rotten person doing terrible things. When Eric talked about it he said he wanted to be as much like his hero Humbert Humbert as he could get away with without being arrested.

The girl I met on the Greyhound begged me to lend my copy to her just before she got off in Omaha. She had a romantic interlude with another guy while we were all becoming traveling buddies. I turned around to say something in Iowa and she was kissing this other guy. When I acted startled she broke off with him and said, I want to kiss you, and I pulled away. The guy laughed and was rude to her about it. We talked and I tried to make her feel less embarrassed about the situation. She asked to borrow the book and said a few deprecating things, suggesting what I was thinking about her--that it was a good book for her. I gave her my address and she was supposed to send it back to me after she read it.

Viola had arranged with Mom for me to stay with her until after the New Year. the highlight of the trip for me was watching my sister's television, by myself, on New Year's Eve. They had asked me to spend a few hours on my own because Eric and Viola needed their "grown-up time." Eric doled out the title "grown-up" like like it was an award that he controls. I was actually pleased that they wanted to dump me on New Year's Eve because it meant I could probably watch a television program without the banality of Eric and Viola's face sucking, and opinionizing, or worse, Eric getting bored and wanting to send me to bed before it was over. The show was a special musical presentation that would be long, the closing of Winterland, with the Grateful Dead and the Blues Brothers.

When I told them what I wanted Eric weighed it all out. He decided to make it special for me and lent Viola his good television. After lots of his niggling warnings of special precaution that I needed to take not to destroy his Sony.

He was a huge booster of the Sony brand. His televison was a $300.00 Sony and it was "just a little bugger," and it cost that much.

After Eric had "given me my first job," throwing debris off the roof of a liquor store in Albany while he botched a contracting job re-roofing it, I spent some of the $75.00 he paid me on a radio. I objected to his continually saying it was my "first job." I told him I had been working all along with my mother in her craft businesses as a fellow craft producer and assistant to all the things involved in getting the stand put up and taken down from the time I was 9. He said there was something special about working on a real job with a salary. When he announced the job was a mess and he was going to have to pay the Armenian owners their money back, I thought right away, he would take back the money he paid me, but he said, I could keep it. That it was my fair pay and he was the one who would take all the loss.

I had some pleasure in telling him the radio I bought was a Sony. When I got home I put the one speaker $55.00 Sony on the upholstered footstoop, later with a slice across the underside to make a secret stash for my magazines, beside my mattress, on the floor, in the room, that I shared with my mother.

They had a lot of things for me to do on that vacation. We were constantly going to movies and dinner. They involved me in their at home meal preparations. They tried to teach me how to eat like a hippy. Eric thought there was something clever about eating canned fish that was not tuna, but tasted just the same, because it cost 20 cents less. And not only that, he did not use mayonaise, he mixed it up with French's mustard. I started making my tuna like that some years later when I had begun to be taken in by my sister and Eric and had abandoned my mother to live with my father.

My sister was going to junior college and living part of the time in a house that belonged to a family who employed her as an au pair for their two young daughters. When Eric boldly announced to me that he was a pedophile early into this visit, he also proclaimed himself a socialist. He equated his stance on pedophilia with any other minority issue.

One of the movies we saw while I was there was "All That Jazz." Eric was swooning over the girl who played the daughter and kept asking Viola and I if we thought she was like the oldest of the girls Viola took care of.

There was one weekend when the girl stayed over with Viola and Eric. She and I had been coloring in some of Viola and Eric's coloring books Viola liked to color in the fcancy coloring books the hippies made for art museums and book stores, with her fancy felt markers. One of the coloring books that Eric brought out and suggested we use was a graphic gynechological thing that made the girl cringe and laugh a bit. I turned it down and said "No Thanks, I am fine with these we have." She said she did'nt mind if we used it and Eric left it with us anyway. It was just like the other coloring books except that the theme was female genitalia. After flipping through it I decided I did not care for coloring in it and put it aside.

That night when they began to retire Eric informed me that they did not want me to join them in their bedroom to watch television and I would need to amuse myself with a book or something. I spent the night with a yellow coverless copy of Justine by Lawrence Durrell because Viola had been telling me what a brilliant writer he was and how only someone as brilliant as Eric could understand the thing. "It is really weird," was about all she really said about it.

Once Viola and I were alone she told me what went on in the room with the girl that night. She said she was upset with Eric because of what he had done. He had her on the bed and he was tickling and fondling her too much. "Sometimes he goes too far and I don't think it is too cool." she said. She wanted to know what I thought she should do. I was only 14 when she was doing this and I had no suspicions about how genuine my sister was being in bringing this matter up to me. I feel now that she was Eric's fully aware accomplice in all of this and this was a way to get me involved in what they were doing and to examine my reaction to the situation. I told her I thought she should not bring the girl over to spend time with Eric. She talked around the issue of what the police could do to him if they found out. She wanted me to know she did not want to go to the police because they would arrest him. They might even arrest her. She said it was a good suggestion to keep the girl away from Eric more.

After I returned to California to live, the girl, now grown up, recognized me on a bus near her home in Berkeley. She took a seat near me and after introducing herself, she thought a bit and said "I don't hate you because you were always nice. I mean, you didn't do anything. But I hate both of them for what they did to me!" She got off the bus before I could think of anything to say and I never saw her again.