Judy Harju Galliher lives and writes in Northern Virginia. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Hippocampus, Pangyrus, The Manifestation, and HerStry. She received her MFA from the Naslund-Mann School of Writing at Spalding University.

When Nothing Becomes Something

As if I could fall asleep after that.

But that’s what my parents said after I told them, after they got home from the play, after they sent Ronnie the babysitter back to his house across the street. They stood at the oak built-in bookcase that separated the living room and the entryway, they set down their keys, they shuffled the mail, and they heard me, I’m sure they did, after I pointed and said Ronnie touched me here. They looked at each other, not at me, not in my eyes; they didn’t get down to my level and express concern. Instead, they looked at each other, and Mom said, “Okay, go back to bed and go to sleep.”

I trotted barefoot down the hardwood hallway to my pink bedroom, sliding between my sheets and under my pink comforter. But I couldn’t stop feeling the feeling.

I stuffed my pillow between my legs. The first of many times I would sleep with a pillow between my legs. To stop feeling the feeling. 

In high school, my brothers and parents advised me that “Boys just want one thing” from girls. Just one. But didn’t they know that a boy had already taken a thing from me? Didn’t they remember?

Maybe they didn’t. I sure didn’t, not then. I learned to pretend it was nothing, surely it was nothing, since my parents responded with nothing.

But I heeded their warning, kept my legs tightly crossed, and kept the boys from getting the one thing they wanted from me. The one thing I thought was mine.

The next day, I felt awkward standing at the bus stop. Was my body different somehow? Would my teacher be able to tell? Would my classmates – Mike, the other Judy, Mary – know what my body had experienced? My insides had shifted; I felt different. Did they know? Would they notice, and if so, would they understand why I didn’t get any sleep last night?

Did they notice, as the weeks went on, that I started sitting with my legs crossed all the time? Did they notice, as the weeks went on, that I preferred pants to dresses? Did they notice me at all, or just like I was to Mom and Dad that night, did I become invisible?

The morning after I chose to have adult sex—that one thing—I walked along the cubicle sea at my workplace and wondered, would my boss be able to tell? Would my colleagues – Ann, Craig, Jean – know that my body had fully experienced a woman’s sexuality? I felt different, somehow. Something had been awakened in me, not violently, not against my will, but in a new and different way. Did it show in my eyes, my face? The first time I was touched with love rather than lechery? Was my after-sex glow still glowing?

Nothing became something as I sat in my family room on a phone call with my therapist. When our conversation wound back five decades to the night I sat on Ronnie’s lap wearing my nightgown, I told her oh so casually what had happened, since it was really nothing; it had only happened once, I think, although I remember hiding under my bed from Ronnie another night. But really, it was nothing! Her long pause unsettled me, and as I spoke to fill the space, to shrug off her concerns, she interrupted me.

“Stop,” she said. “Just slow down and let yourself feel that.”

For the first time, someone heard me when I said something happened, and they didn’t act like it was nothing. Even over the phone, she saw me. In the following weeks, she helped me see that in addition to the thing Ronnie had taken from me, my parents had taken things, too. I lost my voice from being unheard. I lost my sense of safety from feeling unprotected. And I lost trust in the goodness of humans, especially men, who wanted and took what they thought was only one thing.

 But really, it was everything.