Sheri Venema
“Are you a virgin?” my father asked me. I was 15.
We were sitting in his home study. I sat in an armchair upholstered in red velvet that swallowed me—tiny as I felt. I fingered the deep ridges carved into the claw-like knobs of its wooden arms. I was unnerved to be in this place of solemn authority: the mighty desk of dark wood, the shelves of medical journals, the aura of patriarchal prerogative. My father was not a big man, but his stature filled that room.
He was hard to know, this son of Dutch Calvinist immigrants who had settled in western Michigan. My father had risen in social status as a doctor but retained the austere religious outlook of his forebears. The youngest of five children, I was happy to have at least some of his attention when I tagged along on weekend house calls. Even so, I stayed in the car while he saw to his patients.
Now I would have his full attention. He had motioned me into his study, and his eyes, behind black-framed eyeglasses, pierced me. His face wore no welcoming smile; this would not be a friendly chat.
He had read my diaries.
“Are you a virgin?” he asked. I remember, because I did not know for sure what the word meant. Raised in a churchgoing household, I was unschooled in both the language and the act of sex. My understanding of the word had been clouded by discreet or whispered euphemisms (“being with a man;” “marital duties”) that served only to confuse.
But I understood yearning. For months, I had been scribbling in the green-lined pages of a spiral-bound notebook about my fervent crush on a classmate. And then, the thrill of kissing him! Exquisite, tentative kisses—only kisses—on a spring night, in the woods behind my house, near the creek. Hugging, the moon above us. And then the boy didn’t call. He didn’t call. And still he didn’t call. My anguish spilled onto those green pages. It was all there. The excitement, the doubt, the agony.
One evening when I was gone, my father stole into my bedroom. He opened the top drawer of my desk, lit his pipe, held that notebook in his hands. He turned the pages, laying bare my teenage longing. And then he left his pipe in a little tray on my desk. Seeing it, I felt the stinging prickle of shock, then dread. I knew what had happened and what might be coming. Still, I was not ready for that question.
“Are you a virgin?” he asked. “Have you let a boy touch you?”
I knew what he meant then. The word he didn’t say: Have you let a boy touch you THERE? Did he believe my denial? We never spoke of it again.
For months I could hardly bear to be in the same room with him, feeling so vulnerable, so angry at his invasion, so defiled by his question.
***
During college, when I moved from my parents’ home into my first small apartment, I packed away in a cardboard box all my journals—the spiral-bound notebooks, the random sheets of stationery, even the prepubescent pink plastic diaries with their latches and tiny keys. I wanted to keep all those memories—the schoolgirl crushes, those creekside kisses, the boys who called and the ones who didn’t. I wanted to look back one day on the questions I had then: Why does heaven go on forever? Why do I sometimes hate my parents? Who am I, anyway? All of that surging, emerging self I left on a shelf in the storage room of my parents’ basement.
A few years later I went back for it. The box was gone.
***
More years later. Early summer morning, midweek. Breakfast with my new husband in the dining room of our rented house, an older clapboard two-story. Newlyweds, we had furnished the place largely from the Salvation Army, including a round oak table in the dining room, the center and heartbeat of the house. On that morning, sitting at the table, Jack and I saw my father knock at the side door.
At no time in my brief married life had my father dropped in unannounced. He was not a stop-over-for-coffee kind of dad, not the kind of dad who would ever even arrange to come over for breakfast, much less just appear. I had risen to greet him, expecting dire news. He sat at the table. His face crumpled and he broke into tears. I turned to Jack, confused. What’s happening? Has someone died? How do we react to this? Does he want to be hugged? Ignored? Should we pretend this isn’t happening? Such was my father’s projection of invulnerability that pretending not to see it cracking was actually a possibility.
My father had cried in my presence only once before, driving away from the cemetery where we had buried his mother, my grandmother. He was in the back seat, sobbing. I was nine years old then, twisting to peer over the front seat. Seeing his face contorted in that way shocked me, ruptured my childish idea of how the world worked.
Now he was crying once again. Baffled and disoriented, I leaned down to hug him. I don’t remember my words. Quickly, my father composed himself and wiped his eyes with his handkerchief but could not explain. Would not. And then he was gone. We never spoke of it again.
***
Several years after our father died, I told my sister about his long-ago interrogation of my teenage self and the disappearance of the diaries. We laughed about my consternation over the meaning of “virgin,” and then, telling the tale from such a great distance, I saw for the first time a thread linking my father’s reading of my diaries, their disappearance, and his mysterious weeping.
When I was young, our home, like others built in the 1940s, had a basement incinerator, a metal monster built into the wall that burned all our rubbish. By the time I was married, despite clean air laws, the incinerator was still functional. After the conversation with my sister, I convinced myself that he had burned the box, turning my girlhood memories to ash.
Why would he? Perhaps to purge what he considered my sinful words. Maybe to ease the guilt over his transgression. Or possibly he was just incensed that I had a self—my own unabridged self—that he could not comprehend.
Now I’m not so sure. I want to believe the fire theory; it neatly resolves two mysteries – how the diaries disappeared and why my father cried. And it’s dramatic to imagine him flinging those notebooks into the flames. I find this narrative deeply satisfying, not least because it has my father paying attention to me. But maybe there was no burning. What if I and my words were not even important enough to destroy? What if the box vanished some other way, just tossed in the trash in a general spring cleaning or when my parents moved? I won’t ever know the answer.
But I do know that my father read my journal. I know that he asked about my virginity. I know that all my journals and diaries went missing.
And I know that one day, he sat in my dining room and wept. It was as though a small chisel began tap-tap-tapping at that mask of granite. Just for a moment, he became Dad. I have so few memories of that dad. The only dad things I remember are that he sometimes made us pancakes on Sunday nights, and that, on Sunday mornings, he passed LifeSavers down the pew in church for us to chew on.
Years later, when my father was dying, I sat at his hospital bed, combed his hair, helped him turn from one side to the other, guided him to the commode. I scribbled words in a small lined notebook: “To be needed by my father is a new thing for me.” He told childhood stories: how a farmer shot at him and his brother as they poached walnuts; how his Dutch grandfather, who had a “wild streak,” impregnated a 16-year-old when he was in his 30s; how that wild streak got passed down the generations; how one of his uncles was kicked out of church for shooting paper wads at the minister during a service. He laughed then, at all those crazy stories.
When I ponder all this, I think how anxious he might have been confronting my 15-year-old self. Shamed, too, because he knew he had betrayed me, so he armed himself with austerity. Terrified because I gave away kisses – and who knew what else? And the “what else,” if it led to a pregnant teenage daughter, might ruin his hard-won standing in the community, in the church. Bound as he was by his stern Calvinism and terrified by my budding sexuality, of course he was frightened. I can give him that.
When he came over that summer day and spilled tears in my dining room, I want to think he regretted all of it—invading my world, puncturing my trust, thinking the worst, and perhaps destroying my words. I want to think he meant to ask forgiveness. He will never say those words now, dead these many years.
But I can hear them, if I choose.
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Sheri Venema is a Baltimore-based writer whose nonfiction has appeared in Coal Hill Review, Art in the Time of Covid-19 (San Fedele Press) and Thin Ice: Coming of Age in Grand Rapids (Eerdmans), and is forthcoming in Emerge Literary Journal. Her essays have also appeared in Baltimore Style magazine and online at Baltimore Fishbowl. Her travel writing and feature stories have been published in Baltimore Magazine and The Washington Post.