Lucky

  "So, you coming home with me?" he asked.

  "I don't know," I said.

  "Well, it's cold as a witch's clit out here, I'm going home. Come or don't come."

  "I have my contacts in," I said.

  He was smooth and drunk and had done it all a thousand times before. "Well, you've got two choices. You can walk home and you can sleep alone in your bed, or I can drive you there and wait for you while you take your contacts out."

  "You'd do that?"

  He stayed outside in his car. I hurried up the elevator in Haven, went to my room, and removed my lenses. It was late but I woke Lila anyway. I knocked on her door. She answered it in her Lanz nightgown. Her room was dark. I had woken her up. "What is it?" she asked angrily.

  "This is it," I said to Lila. "I'm going home with Jamie. I'll be back in the morning. Promise you'll have breakfast with me."

  "Fine," she said, and shut the door.

  I had wanted someone to be in on it with me.

  It was snowing heavily now. To stay focused on the road, we were quiet. The heat rushed out of the dash onto my legs. Jamie was my guide on a mission to a place I'd never been. I had one last chance to make it before the walls closed in. His random promiscuity now seemed glorious to me. In the way he had talked about it, I knew there was as much bravado as there was real joy. I realized even then that he'd been drunk during so many of these encounters. He was drunk now. But all of this was detail work to me. Drinking. Promiscuity. An undirected life. They were all, to my mind, a product of his own choice. No one had made him drink or fuck or run. Now, I can look and see that it may have been otherwise; then, I stared out at the road. The wipers were going. Snow built up on either side of them and formed a white widow's peak in the middle of the windshield. I was going home with a normal man--by most standards an attractive one--and he was taking me there to make love to me.

  I had spent time imagining his place. It was less than fabulous when we arrived. He lived in a one-bedroom apartment. The living area had no furniture, just milk crates jammed with albums and tapes, and a stereo that sat on the carpeted floor. He walked in and threw his school bag down, took a leak with the bathroom door open, from which I looked away, and reentered the kitchen. There was a let's-just-get-to-it attitude now that we were in his apartment. I stood in the hallway between the darkened kitchen area and the unfurnished living area. His bedroom was near the bathroom. I knew that was where we were going, knew that was what I had come here for, but I hesitated. I was afraid.

  Jamie said he guessed I was new enough so he should offer me a drink. He had an open bottle of white wine in the fridge and two dirty wineglasses. He held the glasses under the tap and then filled both with wine. I took my dripping glass and sipped.

  "You can put your bag down," he said. "Music would make this easier, huh?"

  He walked into the living area and crouched down over a milk crate of tapes. He picked up, scanned, and tossed back two or three. I put my book bag near the front door. He chose Bob Dylan, the kind of slow, stalling melodies that always made me feel as if the dead were rattling their chains. I wasn't a Dylan fan, but I knew enough not to say anything.

  "Don't stand there like a statue," he said, turning and coming closer. "Kiss me."

  Something in my kiss displeased him.

  "Look, you wanted this," he said. "Don't clam up now."

  He suggested I go and brush my teeth. I said I would but I didn't have a toothbrush.

  "Haven't you ever stayed over at a guy's place before?"

  "Yes," I lied, sheepishly.

  "What did you do then?"

  "I used my finger," I said, thinking quickly. "And brushed my teeth that way."

  Jamie walked past me and into the bathroom and found a toothbrush. "Use it," he said. "If you fuck someone you should be able to use their toothbrush!"

  Frightened and drunk and bumbling, I grasped on to this logic. I went into the bathroom and brushed my teeth. I threw water on my face and worried, for just a second, if I looked pretty. But as soon as I looked in the mirror, I looked away. I could not watch what I was doing. I swallowed hard, breathed in, and left the bathroom.

  Jamie was moving dirty laundry off the mattress on the floor of the bedroom. His sheets were soiled and various blankets lay twisted in knots and balls where they had landed when kicked away. He had turned Dylan up. His ski boots lay outside the door on their sides. He'd brought my wine into the bedroom and put it by his clock radio on the milk crate next to the mattress.

  He pulled his shirt off over his head. I had seen very few men's bodies before. His seemed scrawnier than I had imagined, and freckled. The waistband of his long underwear had lost its elasticity and spilled out over the top of his pants.

  "Are you planning to keep your clothes on?" he asked.

  "I'm self-conscious."

  "There's no time for that," he said. "I've got to get up for Spanish in the morning, and then I'm long-hauling to Vermont. Let's get the show on the road."

  Somehow we did. Somehow I lay under him as he fucked me. He fucked me hard. It was what I later heard girls call "athletic sex." I held on. When he came, he came loudly and snorted and bellowed. I wasn't prepared for it. I wept. I wept louder than I ever could have imagined. I shook with it. He stopped his noises and he held tightly to me. I felt humiliated but I couldn't stop. I don't think he knew that he was what I considered my first, but he was smart enough to know where the crying stemmed from.

  "Poor baby," he said. "Poor, poor baby."

  Soon after, he passed out on top of me. I stayed awake all night.

  In the early morning he wanted to have sex again. But first, after kissing me, he pushed me down near his penis. Once there, I didn't know what to do.

  "Haven't you ever done this before?" he asked.

  I tried but gagged.

  "Come up here," he said, releasing me. We kissed some more and, concerned with a look he saw in my eye, he grabbed me by my hair and pulled my head away from his. "Look," he said. "Don't do that. Don't fall in love with me." I didn't know what he meant or how to respond to the reprimand. I said I wouldn't but I didn't know how not to.

  He drove me back to Haven. "Take care of yourself, kiddo," he said. He didn't want responsibility. He'd had enough of it nursing his father. He went off to class and then to ski.

  "Well, I did it," I wrote on Lila's memo board hanging on the outside of her door. I knew she was asleep and was thankful for it. I hadn't slept in over twenty-four hours. I went to my room. I needed time to make it sound good. When I woke in the late afternoon, it was over. I had lost my real virginity. Everything had functioned, if not exactly perfectly, and I had been accepted by a man.

  Of course, I did what he told me not to do. I fell in love with him.

  I did make a good story out of it. I laughed at myself, my fumbling. I got drunk. I called Chris and told him. He loved it. He screamed, "You bagged the prize!" I acted experienced and wise around Lila while we ate Swiss Almond Vanilla Haagen-Dazs. Jamie didn't call me. I reasoned I would see him after Easter, that cool people like the two of us didn't need things like rings or flowers or phone calls. I packed for the trip home to Pennsylvania. I hid a bottle of Absolut in my red bottom-of-the-line Samsonite. I was fine.

  ELEVEN

  In late April, a month after Easter break, I was on Marshall Street. It was midafternoon. Spring had finally come to Upstate New York in that peekaboo way that it does. There was still old snow on the ground. Each winter, the snow made Syracuse beautiful; it covered the gritty, Northeastern browns and grays of the buildings and roads. But by April, everyone had had enough of it, and the warmth was celebrated by the students. They wore shorts, despite the fact that goose bumps rose up and down their arms and legs, and the girls showed off their Florida tans. The street was crowded, and with the anticipation of the end of classes that meant the start of good times, students were smiling and laughing and buying SU paraphernalia in the stores on Marshall Street.

  I h
ad gone shopping for my sister. She was graduating magna cum laude from Penn. As I walked up Marshall, a group of fraternity boys and their girlfriends were coming my way. They were all bright spring smiles. Two of the boys flaunted their toughness by wearing white starched boxer shorts with the standard no-sock Docksiders on their feet. I looked at them because I had to; they were covering the sidewalk and begging for attention. But there was someone trying to get by them on the other side.

  I grew up watching Bewitched, in which the Elizabeth Montgomery character was able to snap her fingers and freeze everyone but herself and her husband, Darrin. They continued talking while the frozen people stayed still in their awkward, formerly animated poses. That was how it felt that day. I saw Gregory Madison blocked by this crowd, and then, he saw me. Everything else stopped.

  I don't know why I hadn't thought that this could happen. But I hadn't. I still envisioned him in jail, or, at least, not stupid enough to come back to the university area before the trial. But there he was. In October he had been cocksure when he spotted me. Now we saw each other, recognized each other, and nodded. No words. It was a split second. The happy frat boys and girls stood between us. We passed by them on either side. His eyes told me what I needed to know. I had become his opponent now, no longer merely his victim. This he recognized.

  Lila and I had begun, sometime that winter, to call each other Clone. We both gained from it. By being my clone, she could seem a bit more daring and wild than she really was; I could pretend that I was a normal college coed whose life revolved as much around my classes and food runs to Marshall Street as it did a rape trial. As Clones we decided to room together off campus. The two of us, and a friend of Lila's named Sue, found a three-bedroom apartment in an off-campus area where many students lived. We were excited about living in a real house, and, certain the trial would have to be over by then, I saw this as a fresh start. We would take possession in the fall.

  By the first week of May, I was packing to go home for the summer. I'd gotten a B in my Shakespeare class and said good-bye to Jamie. I had no illusions that I would hear from him.

  I had taken a course called Cervantes in English in which, for the final paper, I took my revenge on the myth of La Mancha. I reinterpreted Don Quixote as a modern urban parable and made Sancho the hero. He was street smart where Quixote was not. In my version, Quixote drowns in a curbside puddle, unable to realize it is not a lake.

  Before I left, I called Gail to let her know my schedule. All spring, the office of the district attorney had given me an "any minute now" rap and this time was no different. She thanked me and asked me about my plans.

  "I'll get a summer job, I guess," I said.

  "I'm hoping we'll go to trial soon," she said. "You will be available, won't you?"

  "It's my number-one priority," I said, not putting it together until years later: In rape cases, it was almost expected that the victim would drop out of the process even if she originally initiated it.

  "Alice, let me ask you something," she said, her tone shifting a bit.

  "Yes?"

  "Will you have someone with you from home?"

  "I don't know," I said.

  I had talked to my parents about this during the Christmas holidays and then again at Easter. My mother had spoken to her psychiatrist, Dr. Graham, about it, and my father fretted that the longer the trial was postponed, the greater the chance it would ruin his annual trip to Europe.

  Until recently I believed that their final decision, that he would be the one who came with me, was based on her own inability to be there--the unpredictable chances of a flap. But as it turned out, Dr. Graham had counseled her to go despite her panic.

  In the phone call in which my mother told me how the decision had ultimately been made, I stayed quiet. I asked the questions a reporter would ask. Numbly, I gathered the information. My mother was peeved at Graham, she said, because, of course, Graham would "support the professional, i.e., your father."

  "So Dad didn't want to come with me either?" I asked, playing out what she'd begun.

  "Of course not, his precious Spain awaited."

  What I came away with was the fact that neither one of them had wanted to be at the trial with me. They had their reasons; I acknowledge these.

  Finally, it was decided, my father would come with me. I held out a small corner of hope, up until the moment my father and I boarded the plane, that my mother would park her car in the longterm lot and rush in. No matter how tough my pose, I both wanted and needed her.

  By the close of her senior year, Mary had mastered fifteen Arab dialects and won a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the University of Damascus in Syria. I was both jealous and in awe. I made my first, but not my last, joke about our respective majors. "Yours may be Arabic," I said. "It looks like mine is rape."

  Mary excelled academically in a way I never could, perhaps in a way I was too distracted to ever attempt. But the truth was, Mary had been escaping via academics for a long time. Raised in a house where my mother's problems provided the glue of family, she patterned herself after my father. Learn a language of another country and then you can go to that country: a place where the problems of your family will not follow. A language they do not speak.

  I had not quite given up on the idea of the blissful sibling relationship that my mother wanted for us, but events always conspired, it seemed, to make this impossible. The City of Syracuse scheduled testimony to begin on May 17, the same day as my sister's commencement ceremony at Penn. I continually stole her spotight whether I wanted to or not.

  I talked to Gail. They could not reschedule the trial, but they would lead with the other witnesses and somehow work it so I could testify on the second day. My father and I booked a flight for the evening of the seventeenth. Directly after Mary's graduation, my mother would drop us off at the Philadelphia airport. Until then, my mother, father, and I agreed, Mary's day would be our focus.

  My mother, Mary, and I went clothes shopping--Mary for a dress to wear to graduation, me for an outfit for the trial.

  Both my sister and I had strayed far from the way we were dressed as children, my mother having a penchant for the colors of the flag. Mary went toward dark greens and creams, I went to black and blue. But for the trial, I ceded my Gothic tendencies to my mother. I put her firmly in control. I would wear, as it resulted, a red blazer, a white blouse, a blue skirt.

  In the evening, on the sixteenth, my father and I packed. On the seventeenth, we all dressed in our separate rooms and prepared for the drive down to Penn. I took a last look in my mirror. Whatever the trial's result, my part in it would be over by the time I saw myself there again. I was going to Syracuse and would meet and see many people, but all I thought about was the one appointment I had to keep. I had a date with Gregory Madison. As I opened the door of my bedroom I breathed deeply. I shut myself off. I turned myself on. I was Mary's little sister--excited, ebullient, alive.

  At the ceremony, my father would march in his Princeton colors. Mary and he stood with us in the crowded lobby of the auditorium, where mothers and fathers fussed over the last-minute set of mortarboards, and one woman, unhappy with her daughter's mascara, spit-washed the black flecks from under her eyes. Extended families surrounded the happy graduates, flashbulbs popped, and self-conscious girls and boys tried to make mortarboards look less than nerdy by tilting them on their heads.

  My grandmother, mother, and I found our seats on the main floor, to the side of the large body of graduating students. I stood on my chair to find Mary. I spotted her smiling beside another girl, a friend of hers I didn't know.

  After the ceremony, we celebrated with a lunch at the Faculty Club. My mother took too many pictures of us on the concrete benches outside. My mother still has an enlargement framed and mounted from that day. I used to wish that she would take it down. But it commemorates an important day in our family: my sister's graduation, my rape trial.

  I don't remember the airport. I remember the rush from a
day of celebration into the onset of dread. Once in Syracuse, we were met by Detective John Murphy from the DA's office. This man, with prematurely gray hair and a friendly smile, approached my father and me as we located the signs for the main terminal.

  "You must be Alice," he said, and extended his hand.

  "Yes." How had he known me?

  He introduced himself to my father and to me, told us his job--to act as our escort over the next twenty-four hours--and offered to carry my bag. As we walked briskly toward the exit, he explained our accommodations and that Gail would meet us in the cafe in the lobby.

  "She wants to go over the testimony," he said.

  Finally, I asked, "How did you know who I was?"

  He looked blankly at me. "They showed me some photos."

  "I would have hoped I looked better than that, if they're the photos you mean."

  My father was tense; he walked at a remove from us.

  "You're a beautiful girl, you can tell that even in those photos," Murphy said. He was smooth. He knew the answers to give and the things to say.

  In the county car on the way to the hotel, Murphy talked over his shoulder to my father, making eye contact with him in the rearview at lights and turns.

  "Follow sports, Mr. Sebold?" he asked.

  My father did not.

  Murphy tried fishing.

  My father did his best here but had little to go on. If Murphy had gotten up at 5:00 A.M. to study Cicero, they might have had something to start with.

  We ended up on Madison.

  "Even in holding," Murphy said, "I might go up there and say 'thanks' to a guy, act all friendly with him. Then I leave. That gets them in trouble with the other inmates, makes them look like an informer. I'll do that to that puke if you want."

  I don't remember my response, if I had any. I was aware of my father's discomfort and, in turn, aware that my own comfort with such talk had grown during the last year. I liked men like Murphy. Their quick, exact talk. Their no-bones-about-it demeanor.

  "They don't like rapists," Murphy informed my father. "It can go rough on them. They hate child molesters the most, but rapists aren't much above."