When I was 8 years old I had sex for the first time. I had no memory of it happening the next day when I woke up. None whatsoever. Just blood in my panties. I debated whether to tell my mother - something told me it would just worry her needlessly. But finally I decided to go the cautious route and got up the courage to show her the bloodstain. How had it got there? I had no idea. At that age I didn't even know I had a vagina - that's how innocent and pure I was.
She took one look and said "I'm phoning the doctor."
This event occurred while our family was staying in Toronto for the month of July, 1959. Our reason for being there was twofold: so my dad could take a summer course at U of T to finish his Bachelor of Music. And so my twin brother and I could attend a special "summer school" somewhere in the city or its environs.
I don't remember a thing about this summer school except that it was a day school and we were enrolled for the whole month. I can't call up a single event or even an image, not even a trace of a memory of the classroom, the other kids, what we did there, what games we may have played. Nothing. It's just a blank.
Neither my brother nor I ever discussed it, and if he remembered details about that month he never mentioned any. As if everything to do with that school and the content of the program or whatever happened every morning and afternoon once we got there was totally erased. When I try to imagine it, in my mind's eye all that appears is an empty white cube.
But I can clearly remember the doctor's office where my mother took me, with its waiting room and padded table where I had my first pelvic exam. And the solemn look on the doctor's face when he told her, "well, it could be early menses." At eight years old? He was non-commital. "It has been known to happen."
No alternative cause was discussed in my presence. I remember going with my mother to a pharmacy and buying pads and a little belt, and being shown how to wear this equipment which I would be doing every month from now on. My mother never lied so that night I slept with the pad on but in the morning when I checked there was no blood.
"Well, keep the box in your closet just in case," my mother said. By then we were back home in Montreal where I had my own bedroom and a closet where the box of napkins collected dust for seven more years.
But for the next few months I waited to menstruate again. A false alarm, I came to believe as I got on with my busy life in Grade Three while my initation into womanhood faded into the past.
Of our month in Toronto, little remains although I can vividly recall the afternoon when we arrived at the home of an aunt and uncle who flew to England for a month's vacation the next day with their daughter, my cousin. I recall playing in her tree house in the backyard and visiting the local swimming pool that first day -- many first impressions and then a Big Nothing until the morning I woke up with bloodstained underwear and told my mother.
Soon afterwards we drove back to Montreal- I remember the trip, at night. My parents in the front seat sounding almost fearful. We had been to a movie, Disney's Snow White, in downtown Toronto and afterwards walking back to the car my dad stopped to pick up a small plastic bag from the sidewalk - it had white powder inside. "Dope," my mother said and he dropped it in a trash can, just before we hit the road for home.
"What's dope?" I asked.
There are many more things I don't remember that I could talk about, but my next vivid memory is from the fall when I was home from school (I missed a lot of school again that year) with a stack of Children's Classics beside my bed that I was reading one after the other: Black Beauty, Alice in Wonderland, Little Women, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn -- and when I had plowed through the novels I started on Grimm's Fairy Tales and Hans Christian Anderson. Occasionally getting out of bed to watch an episode of I Love Lucy in the living room with my mother.
I was still 8 years old and getting an education at home in bed as I recovered from one of many childhood illnesses, too many to name, and meanwhile this bedside library had materialized - I suspect it came from those psychiatrists at McGill that my mother was talking to.
And all was well until I got to The Little Mermaid in the Anderson collection - and had a meltdown. I couldn't stop crying. I knew the Little Mermaid and I were one and the same, her story was my story- so tragic that I sobbed for an hour. My mother got alarmed and blamed the author for writing a story so sad it made a little girl weep uncontrollably for hours - but I knew it wasn't his fault. I was the author of my misery, because I was the mermaid who glimpses the handsome prince and saves him from drowning but when he wakes up he has no memory of her and falls in love with the first princess who crosses his path. True love is sacrificed on the altar of politics and appearances, and that was the sad truth of life.
I wept because it had happened to me, too -- I couldn't remember where or how. I knew the prince was still walking the earth, somewhere living his life in the sun while I would lurk underwater, the littlest Mermaid who did her best but her best just wasn't enough...
Meanwhile, that same year, 1959, a new comic book hero appeared on my radar. Green Lantern.
I'm not sure who introduced us - possibly my cousin in Toronto - but it was love at first sight. The first issue I pored over was Volume 1 #22 - I slept with it under my pillow. And soon I had an erotic fixation on this superhero in black and green leotards. I conversed with him in my room at night. I imagined our life together in some undersea realm because in my mind at least Green Lantern, aka Hal Jordan, was a creature of the deep just like me. Born to save the planet.
Number 22 comes up quite a lot - it was my life path number, and also our address (202 rue Dauphin) and it was the sum of the numbers on our license plate in the photo where I am 4 years old perched on the back bumper of my dad's Ford Consul outside a military base. Twenty-two and 11, these are my numbers and they pop up everywhere, like some kind of code - in the date of JFK's assassination (11/22) and my birthday (4/11) - and in that number 22 again on the cover of my first Green Lantern comic.
The magic ring 💍 also spoke to me along with the magic mantra that activated it:
In brightest day, in darkest night
No evil shall escape my sight
Let those who worship Evil's might
Beware my power. Green Lantern's light
Looking back, I secretly wed Green Lantern to compensate for the mysterious bloodstain that never returned. I wrote him fan mail and one of my letters appeared in a later issue: something embarrassing about how romantic it was when he plunged to another near-death with his Elvissy hairdo streaming.
What I realize now, that I didn't know then: I had split into two separate alters after I got raped the previous July. It wasn't "early menstruation" but dissociation and amnesia for a sexual event the night before that I couldn't recall.
Who had interfered with me? I think it was a boy, age 16, with Elvissy hair who was also in the summer school program. The next day he flew home. I stayed behind in Canada. I forgot him. Either it was the trauma, or the way they erased our memories in that program, but whatever it was, I believe it came from England.
Another way to put it is, they sanitized the event. With sanitary pads. Because rape was too dirty and complicated. A memory wipe is much cleaner. And what's the point of a school that you attend for a month, and once it's over all you recall is an empty white cube?
That kind of school programs your subconscious. You don't even know you've been programmed. You remember nothing.
But there's also this: I was in love with the boy. That doesn't excuse what happened. But it throws a whole new light- Green Lantern's light- on a time when we were both guinea pigs in an experiment.
It's a strange kind of life when you're abused and can't remember. To survive this double blow you create an alter that splits off and doesn't remember.
To survive these experiments and their aftereffects, I could have become Snow White awaiting the return of her Prince Charming but instead I became a mermaid. I did it by growing imaginary fins and a tail and swimming away into a fantasy with a comic book superhero.
In retrospect none of this seems so accidental- it seems more like hypnosis and child abuse and the creation of amnesiac sub personalities or alters-
For what purpose? World Domination, of course.
Green Lantern's nemesis was an entity named Sinestro, member of the Legion of Doom, Sinestro Corps, and Secret Society of Super Villains
Thank God their days are numbered.