Uncle/niece/dad/daughter Dance

Lydia finds her mother's diary and uncovers Elizabeth's secret affair with her brother-in-law, Bill, Lydia's uncle.

*

Home from college until late August when she started her Sophomore year in September, soon-to-be 20-year-old, Lydia sat on her bed. When she closed her eyes, as if they were still fighting, she could hear her mother and father fighting. When she closed her eyes, she could hear her mother slamming doors, breaking things, and crying. She had to put a pillow over her head to muffle the sounds so that she'd fall asleep.

'Home sweet home not,' she thought.

With her gone for nearly a year, she looked around her room as if seeing it for the first time. Not feeling as comfortable as she thought she would coming home, returning home felt weird. Instead of making her feel all warm and fuzzy, coming home made her skin crawl. It was as if she came home to a different house.

Her room looked like a copy of her room found on a stage set. Perhaps because her dorm room was so much bigger but her room looked smaller than she remembered it looking last year when she left for school. With everything changed and everything seeming so differently unfamiliar, nothing looked the same. Instead of feeling as if she was part of the family, she felt more like a house guest.

Unbeknownst to her, nothing had changed and everything was still the same. It was only her perception of things that had changed. Now, instead of happy to be home and back in her room, she was bored and embarrassed by her little girl's room. The things that once amused her, dolls, posters of singers, photos of celebrities, and costume jewelry didn't amuse her now. Now, not as easily amused, she felt more like a woman than a girl.

"I've grown up," said Lydia to herself for no one to hear. "I'm a woman now and am no longer a little girl."

'When did that happen? How did that happen? As if I've come alive, maybe when I lost my virginity, now more aware of my body and my sexual needs, that one act opened my eyes to everything around me,' she thought. 'Having sex with someone I like and thought liked me, then never hearing from him again, had a way of maturing a naïve girl into a cautious, savvy woman.'

With her room how she left it, the only thing that had changed was her immaturity. A virginal, confused, and frightened teenage girl when she left for her first year of college at 18-years-old, living on her own and making her own decisions for nearly a year matured her. A lot has happened in just a year. Having done a lot of growing up in a year, now at 19-years-old, as if she was a flower that had bloomed and blossomed overnight, she had grown into a beautiful woman.

When she looked in her mirror, she didn't see her familiar self. She saw her mother, Elizabeth. With them both having the same blonde hair, the same pretty face, and the same blue eyes, they looked so much alike. The only obvious difference between them was, with her taking more after her maternal grandmother when it came to her breast size, she had huge D cup breasts and her mother had modest B cup breasts. Other than that, she looked just like her mother when her mother was her age. As if overnight, she had grown into the beauty that her mother once as.

'With my father, Charles, fat and bald, I'm glad that I look more like my Mom than my Dad,' she thought while laughing how funny she'd look if she looked more like her father than her mother.

No longer a virgin, the sexual experiences that she had with the young men she met at college had helped her blossom from a budding beauty of a moody and morally modest teenager into a white rose of a confident, sexy woman. For sure, she'd never return to the naïve, teenage girl that she was when she left for college. Yet, glad that she had matured, why would she want to replace her experience with innocence? With her birthday at the end of August, by the time she returned to school, she'd be 20-years-old. Ready to begin her second year of college, as if a whole new horizon of knowledge had expanded before her, especially after returning to her old room, she suddenly felt enlightened.

Lydia looked more closely around her room. As if she was moving, all her things, her personal possessions were moved, put in boxes, and stacked in the corner of her room by the door. Always doing spring cleaning, even when it wasn't spring, her mother was turning her room into the guest room. Her mother had a thing for cleaning. Cleaning helped her not to drink.

"Cleaning instead of drinking is my motto now," said her mother after finishing her Alcoholics Anonymous, twelve step program and proud of getting her first AA chip.

Now with her not drinking, the house never looked as clean. Everything shined and the furniture smelled of polish. With the dog nearly able to feed himself by eating dropped crumbs of food, the kitchen floor was swept and every carpet was vacuumed.

Her way of not falling off the wagon, with her baking cookies, cakes, and pies, instead of hungover in bed, her Mom had turned into a '50's TV mom complete with wearing her apron, makeup, and a dress. Only, with her not drinking and having stopped smoking at the same time, doubly difficult, she was eating more and had already gained a little weight. Yet, it was healthier for her to gain a few pounds than to die of a fatal disease from smoking and/or drinking.

No doubt, unless Lydia wanted to squat in the guestroom after she graduated from college, she needed to get a job and find her own place to live. Obviously, a not so subtle hint, with her mother turning her room into the guestroom, she was no longer welcome here. Just as well and for the better, her skin crawled with the thoughts of still living at home after graduating college in three-years when she'd be nearly 24-years-old.

Maybe she'd get a good job in the city. Maybe she'd rent her own place or share expenses with a friend. Who knows, maybe she'd have a steady boyfriend by then and they could live together. At least she had other options that didn't include her living at home and babysitting her mother from her falling off the wagon and reverting to her whoring ways.

### Lady of Erotica ###

Ignoring the rest of her junk, puzzles, games, toys, and dolls, the box of old books that sat in the corner caught her curiosity. Obviously, not knowing how much they meant to her, her mother was throwing them away or giving them to the library. This was her chance to salvage some of them and keep the ones she wanted. With her intention to save what was important to her from her childhood, maybe she'd bring some of her old books back to college to reread them.

She loved books. Many of those books were more than just books to her. Some of those books were her best friends. If it wasn't for some of those books, with her mother drinking and drunk and her parents constantly and continually arguing, she didn't think she would have survived her childhood. It was because of her voracious reading that she decided to major in English and minor in Creative Writing in college and perhaps become a writer. Hiding herself away in the lives of the characters she read, her books allowed her to live in a different reality.

Whenever they fought, seemingly all the time, she'd go in her room, put on her headphones, and open a book. It didn't matter which music she listened to or which book she read. She just didn't want to hear them arguing. With her loving them both equally, she grew tired of hearing them calling one another names and putting her in the middle of their stupid arguments. Silence was what she wanted to accomplish by disappearing within herself when reading her books and listening to her music.

She hid in her room a lot that summer before leaving for school. Their fighting had gotten worse and her mother was drinking and smoking more. Perhaps, with her gone away to school, the reality that they'd be alone with one another was a frightening reality neither could face. With her always playing the role of buffer, able to stop them from fighting and her mother from drinking, it was now up to them to act like mature adults. With her living 500-hundred miles away on campus, she'd no longer be there to play referee.

Same old, never ending argument that started exactly where they stopped, she could recite what they said word for word in her sleep. Not wanting to be involved and not wanting to take sides, disappearing in her room and reading is what saved her from them. Curious what her mother thought was trash, she started going through the books she had as a child until she found an unfamiliar one. There, nearly at the bottom of the box, bound in red, worn leather, it was her mother's, old diary.

### Lady of Erotica ###

'Oh, my God,' thought Lydia sitting on her bed in preparation to read it. 'Did she dare open it? Did she dare read it? These are her mother's private, personal thoughts when she was younger.

Justifying her prying eyes, maybe if she read what her mother had written, she'd know why her mother drinks. Justifying her snooping, maybe if she read what her mother wrote, she'd learn more about her mother to help better understand her. Maybe, as part of her AA twelve-step program of apologizing to everyone she hurt with her drinking, her mother left her diary there where she knew she'd find it and read it.'

Lydia sat holding the diary to her breasts as if she had just written and published her first novel. Only, within this journal wasn't her words but her mother's words. Other than she was married to her father, she knew very little about her mother. Secretive and not forthcoming, her mother volunteered very little information about her past and/or about her childhood. She suspected her mother was hiding something. She suspected her mother had a lot of secrets to hide. She suspected with all the drinking her mother needed to do that she was drowning her conscious thoughts so that she wouldn't feel her emotional pain.

Not having a clue what emotional pain her mother felt, a reason that made the most sense, she suspected her mother had been sexually abused as a child. They didn't discuss sexual abuse as much back then as they do now. Her mother being sexually abused as a child would explain the sexual affairs she had with her father's friends, their neighbors, and her co-workers. Not a bad person or a bad mother but if she was to describe her mother, sad to say, she'd say that her mother was a drunk and a whore.

All it would take for her mother to suck and fuck a man, as if it was her excuse, was to get her drunk. She turned into a different person when she was drinking. Unaware that Lydia was watching, thinking that she was sleeping, she remembered staring out her bedroom window at the drunken pool parties her parents had. With her father nursing his drink on the patio and flirting with one of the wives of his friends or neighbors, her mother was in the deep, dark end of the pool fucking or in the cabana sucking. Starting out with kissing and touching, she'd catch a glimpse of her mother pulling up her bathing suit top before walking into the light to get another drink.

With her mother so sexy, sexual, and good looking, every man wanted her mother. She was so very beautiful. More than once she walked in on her drunken mother giving some man she brought home from some bar a hand job or a blowjob. More than once she walked in on her mother naked with one of her father's friends or one of their neighbors. More than once her mother made excuses, blamed her father for her deplorably drunken behavior and her disgusting sexual actions, and/or apologized. After a while, she no longer made excuses, blamed her father, or apologized. After a while, she just drank alone to get drunk.

Now, perhaps with her mother's secrets were captured and saved in her diary, she'd learn more about her mother. More than just for curiosity sake but for learning sake, Lydia was ready to invade her mother's privacy. With her mother ready to discard the book and throw it away anyway, she couldn't help herself from reading it before this opportunity to learn more about her mother disappeared. She quickly flipped through the pages. Many of the entries dated back more than twenty-years, a lifetime ago, a time before she was even born.

As Lydia browsed through the pages, she read things that she would have written now had she kept a diary. She found nothing new or life altering that her mother had written to explain why her mother was a drunken whore. She found thoughts and issues that her mother had as a young woman. Books she read, movies she saw, and thoughts she had about life and about men, especially about men even though she was supposedly happily married to her father. Every page was filled with cursive writing in blue ink.

Nonetheless the boring entries she read, she hoped to find a few gems of how her mother may have felt when she was younger and closer to the age that Lydia was now. It would be valuable to learn something she never knew about her mother. It would be valuable to apply how her mother felt then to possibly how Lydia felt now. It would be eye opening to know why her mother started drinking and whoring around. An entry her mother made when she was 25-years-old, married only a few years and before her mother was pregnant with her, this entry was written in June of 1996.

'Wow,' she thought as she slowly ran her fingers over her mother's handwriting. As if she was a psychic or a clairvoyant, she tried to feel what her mother felt when writing this by touching her words written on the page. With them never having a heart-to-heart mother and daughter conversation, as if her real mother had died and was reincarnated into Suzy homemaker, it was sad that this diary was now the only way she had to connect with her mother.

### Lady of Erotica ###

Most of the entries were the boring same until she came to the entry of her mother with her father's brother, Uncle Bill. Uncle Bill? Seriously?

'Oh, my God,' thought Lydia while reading what her mother wrote so long ago.

"We fell back on my bed and continued kissing. As passionately as he kissed me, I kissed him with as much passion if not with more passion. Obviously and inevitably, a long time coming, we were going to have forbidden sex. Obviously and inevitably, a long-time coming, my husband's brother was going to lick me and fuck me and I was going to suck him and fuck him."

As if her mother's words were cold water splashed in her face, she couldn't believe that Uncle Bill and her mother had a sexual affair. She couldn't believe they had sex. She had to reread that passage to realize that her mother had an illicit, forbidden, sexually affair with Uncle Bill. She couldn't believe that her mother had sex with Uncle Bill. Lydia flipped to the beginning of where her mother wrote about the affair.

'Wow,' thought Lydia. 'Oh my God, I don't believe this. This is so frigging unbelievable. Are you kidding me? My mother had sex with Uncle Bill. Had I not found this diary, I never would have known. I never would have suspected their sordid affair. I wonder if my father knows. Maybe that's why Uncle Bill is no longer welcomed in our house,' she thought again. 'With my father five years older than my Mom and Uncle Bill the same as her, maybe that's why they were attracted to one another.'

Now piecing together some of their most heated arguments, their anger and frustration made more sense.

'Maybe that's why they argued so much. Maybe that's why my mother drank to an excess,' thought Lydia. 'Maybe my mother wasn't sexually abused but just married the wrong brother. Or maybe she was sexually abused and married the wrong brother. I don't know. I have no idea. Hopefully after reading her diary, maybe I'll know why she became a drunken whore.'

Just as she couldn't believe she was about to read this, she couldn't believe her mother wrote this. As shocked as she was sexually excited, she couldn't believe she was about to read this entry in her mother's diary as if she was reading Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, Gustave Flaubert's Madam Bovary, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, or Jane Austen's Emma. Instead she was reading about the love affair between her mother and her father's brother, Bill, her Uncle Bill.

### Lady of Erotica ###

Saturday, June 29, 1996.

"Even though this happened so very long ago, before Lydia was born, with it still fresh in my mind, I needed to write this as if it happened yesterday instead of two-years ago. I needed to forgive myself for what I had done. I needed to put the words to paper to get them out of my head. Perhaps, by reading what I wrote, I wouldn't feel as guilty and drink as much. Perhaps rereading what I wrote, I'd feel more human than the monster I've grown to believe I am. If Charlie every found out that I had sex with his brother, he'd never forgive me."

Lydia looked away from the page stunned. Always knowing that her mother was a whore but not thinking that her mother would cross the sexual line with her own brother-in-law, she was shocked that her mother had sex with Uncle Bill. Already stunned, she didn't know how much more she could take reading about their incestuous affair.

A sister-in-law having sex with her brother-in-law, a wife having sex with her husband's brother, and a brother having sex with his brother's wife were the sexual affairs that fueled soap operas, that writers wrote books about, and directors made movies. This is the type of trash that bored housewives read late at night while wishing it was them having the sexual affairs. This is what lonely women think about when masturbating themselves in the heat of the sexually frustrated moment. She continued reading about her mother as if she was reading about someone else.

"As if it was meant to be, such perfect timing and something I couldn't have planned if I tried, he caught me when I was changing out of my bathing suit. In a moment of wretched, wanton abandonment, I remember being as embarrassed as I was sexually excited. Catching me by surprise, as if he knew I was standing there naked waiting for him, expecting him, and wanting him, something he had never done before, he walked upstairs and opened my bedroom door without knocking.

As if I was a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming car, I was standing in front of my bedroom mirror naked when he opened my bedroom door. He stared at me as if he had never seen a naked woman before. He stared at me as if I was the grand prize, winning ticket in a lottery. As if to show him all of me, and as if I wanted him to see me naked, instead of turning away from him, I turned to face him.

In that moment, as if already saying yes to him, I was his for the taking. With me already making the first move by continuing to stand there naked, it was up to him to make the next move. As if he was naked too, he stared at me in the same way that I stared at him. Only, he wasn't naked. He was wearing his bathing suit but, as if he was standing there naked too, I couldn't help but notice that he had an erection. I wondered if his erection was for me or for someone else."

'Oh, my God,' thought Lydia. Never sexually thinking of her Uncle Bill before, with her no longer a virgin after losing her virginity at a frat party and again during spring break, she was sexually thinking about her Uncle Bill now. 'Like mother like daughter, and with Uncle Bill a good-looking man, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree,' she thought.

"Just as he always wanted me, I always wanted him too. Obviously, I married the wrong brother. Perhaps, had I married Bill instead of Charlie, I wouldn't be the drunk that I am today. Perhaps, had I married Bill instead of Charlie, I wouldn't be a whore with the need to fuck and suck other men. Perhaps, had I married Bill instead of Charlie, I wouldn't be having a sexual affair with my husband's brother."