Lucky

  "Can I go now?" I asked.

  "Come here," he said. "Kiss me good-bye." It was a date to him. For me it was happening all over again.

  I kissed him. Did I say I had free will? Do you still believe in that?

  He apologized again. This time he cried. "I'm so sorry," he said. "You're such a good girl, a good girl, like you said."

  I was shocked by his tears, but by now it was just another horrible nuance I couldn't understand. So he wouldn't hurt me more, I needed to say the right thing.

  "It's okay," I said. "Really."

  "No," he said, "it's not right what I did. You're a good girl. You weren't lying to me. I'm sorry for what I did."

  I've always hated it in movies and plays, the woman who is ripped open by violence and then asked to parcel out redemption for the rest of her life.

  "I forgive you," I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death.

  He perked up. Looked at me. "You're a beautiful girl," he said.

  "Can I take my purse?" I asked. I was afraid to move without his permission. "My books?"

  He went back to business now. "You said you had eight dollars?" He took it from my jeans. It was wrapped around my license. It was a photo ID. New York State didn't have them yet but Pennsylvania did.

  "What is this?" he asked. "Is this one of them meal cards I can use at McDonald's?"

  "No," I said. I was petrified of him having my identification. Leaving with anything other than what he had: all of me, except my brain and my belongings. I wanted to leave the tunnel with both of them.

  He looked at it a moment longer until he was convinced. He did not take my great-grandmother's sapphire ring, which had been on my hand the whole time. He was not interested in that kind of thing.

  He handed me my purse and the books I'd bought that afternoon with my mother.

  "Which way you going?" he asked.

  I pointed. "All right," he said, "take care of yourself."

  I promised that I would. I started walking. Back out over the ground, through the gate to which I'd clung a little over an hour before, and onto the brick path. Going farther into the park was the only way toward home.

  A moment later.

  "Hey, girl," he yelled at me.

  I turned. I was, as I am in these pages, his.

  "What's your name?"

  I couldn't lie. I didn't have a name other than my own to say. "Alice," I said.

  "Nice knowing you, Alice," he yelled. "See you around sometime."

  He ran off in the opposite direction, along the chain-link fence of the pool house. I turned. I had done my job. I had convinced him. Now I walked.

  I didn't see a soul until I reached the three short stone steps that led from the park to the sidewalk. On the opposite side of the street was a frat house. I kept walking. I remained on the sidewalk close to the park. There were people out on the lawns of the frat house. A kegger party just dying out. At the place where my dorm's street dead-ended into the park, I turned and started to walk downhill past another, larger dormitory.

  I was aware I was being stared at. Party-goers coming home or grinds taking in the last bit of sober air before the summer. They talked. But I wasn't there. I heard them outside of me, but like a stroke victim, I was locked inside my body.

  They came up to me. Some ran, but then stepped back when I didn't respond.

  "Hey, did you see her?" they said to one another.

  "She's really fucked up."

  "Look at the blood."

  I made it down the hill, past those people. I was afraid of everyone. Outside, on the raised platform that surrounded Marion Dorm's front door, were people who knew me. Knew my face if not my name. There were three floors in Marion, a floor of girls between two floors of boys. Outside now it was mostly the boys. One boy opened the outer door for me to let me pass through. Another held the inner one. I was being watched; how could I not have been?

  At a small table near the door was the RSA--resident security assistant. He was a graduate student. A small, studious Arab man. After midnight they checked ID's of anyone trying to get in. He looked at me and then hurriedly stood.

  "What has happened?" he asked.

  "I don't have my ID," I said.

  I stood before him with my face smashed in, cuts across my nose and lip, a tear along my cheek. My hair was matted with leaves. My clothes were inside out and bloodied. My eyes were glazed.

  "Are you all right?"

  "I want to go to my room," I said. "I don't have my ID," I repeated.

  He waved me in. "Promise me," he said, "that you will take care of yourself."

  Boys were in the stairwell. Some of the girls too. The whole dorm was still mostly awake. I walked by them. Silence. Eyes.

  I walked down the hall and knocked on the door of my best friend Mary Alice's room. No one. I knocked on my own, hoping for my roommate. No one. Last, I knocked on the door of Linda and Diane, two of a group of six of us who had become friends that year. At first there was no answer. Then the doorknob turned.

  Inside, the room was dark. Linda was kneeling on her bed and holding the door open. I had woken her up.

  "What is it?" she asked.

  "Linda," I said, "I was just raped and beaten in the park."

  She fell back and into the darkness. She had passed out.

  The doors were spring-hinged and so the door slammed shut.

  The RSA had cared. I turned around and walked back downstairs to his desk. He stood.

  "I was raped in the park," I said. "Will you call the police?"

  He spoke quickly in Arabic, forgetting himself, then, "Yes, oh, yes, please come."

  Behind him was a room with glass walls. Though meant as an office of some sort, it was never used. He led me in there and told me to sit down. Because there was no chair, I sat on top of the desk.

  Boys had gathered from outside and now stared in at me, pressing their faces near the glass.

  I don't remember how long it took--not long because it was university property and the hospital was only six blocks south. The police arrived first, but I have no memory of what I said to them there.

  Then I was on a gurney, being strapped down. Then out in the hallway. There was a large crowd now and it blocked the entrance. I saw the RSA look over at me as he was being questioned.

  A policeman took control.

  "Get out of the way," he said to my curious peers. "This girl's just been raped."

  I surfaced long enough to hear those words coming from his lips. I was that girl. The ripple effect began in the halls. The ambulance men carried me down the stairs. The doors of the ambulance were open. Inside, as we charged, sirens screaming, to the hospital, I let myself collapse. I went somewhere deep inside myself, curled up and away from what was happening.

  They rushed me through the emergency room doors. Then into an examination room. A policeman came inside as the nurse was helping me take off my clothes and change into a hospital gown. She wasn't happy to have him there, but he averted his eyes and flipped forward to a clean page in his pocket notebook.

  I couldn't help but think of detective shows on television. The nurse and policeman argued over me as he began to ask questions, take my clothes for evidence as she swabbed my face and back with alcohol and promised me the doctor would be there soon.

  I remember the nurse better than I do him. She used her body as a shield between us. As he gathered preliminary evidence--my basic account--she said things to me as she took items for the evidence kit.

  "You must have given him a run for his money," she said.

  When she took the scraping from under my nails, she said, "Good, you got a piece of him."

  The doctor arrived. A female gynecologist named Dr. Husa.

  She began to explain what she was going to do while the nurse shooed out the policeman. I lay on the table. She was going to inject me with Demerol in order to relax me enough for her to gather evidence. It might also make me want to pee. I was
not to do that, she said, because that might disrupt the culture of my vagina and destroy the evidence the police needed.

  The door opened.

  "There's someone here who wants to see you," the nurse said.

  Somehow, I thought it might be my mother, and I panicked.

  "A Mary Alice."

  "Alice?" I heard Mary Alice's voice. It was soft, afraid, even.

  She took my hand and I squeezed it hard.

  Mary Alice was beautiful--a natural blonde with gorgeous green eyes--and on that day, particularly, she reminded me of an angel.

  Dr. Husa let us talk for a moment as she prepped the area.

  Mary Alice, like everyone else, had been drinking heavily at a year-end bash held at a nearby fraternity house.

  "Don't say I can't sober you up," I said to her, and for the first time I cried too, letting the tears leak out as she gave me what I needed most, a small smile to acknowledge my joke. It was the first thing from my old life that I recognized on the other side. It was horribly changed and marked, my friend's smile. It was not free and open, born of the silliness our smiles had been all year, but it was a comfort to me. She cried more than I did and her face became mottled and swollen. She told me how Diane, who, like Mary Alice, was five ten, had practically lifted up the small RSA in order to get my whereabouts out of him.

  "He wasn't going to tell anyone but your roommate, but Nancy was up in your room, passed out."

  I smiled at the idea of Diane and Mary Alice lifting up the RSA, his feet doing a wild walk in the air like a Keystone Kop.

  "We're ready," Dr. Husa said.

  "Will you stay with me?" I asked Mary Alice.

  She did.

  Dr. Husa and the nurse worked together. Every so often they needed to massage my thighs. I asked them to explain everything they did. I wanted to know everything.

  "This is different from a regular exam," Dr. Husa explained. "I need to take samples in order to make up a rape kit."

  "That's evidence so you can get this creep," the nurse said.

  They took pubic clippings and pubic combings and samples of blood and semen and vaginal discharge. When I would wince, Mary Alice squeezed my hand harder. The nurse tried to make conversation, asked Mary Alice what she majored in up at the school, told me I was lucky to have such a good friend, said that being beaten up like I had would make the cops listen to me more attentively.

  "There is so much blood," I heard Husa say worriedly to the nurse.

  As they did the combings, Dr. Husa said, "Ah, now, there is a hair from him!" The nurse held the evidence bag open and Dr. Husa shook the combings into it.

  "Good," the nurse said.

  "Alice," Dr. Husa said, "we are going to let you urinate now but then I will have to take stitches inside."

  The nurse helped me sit up and then scooted a bedpan under me. I urinated for such a long time that the nurse and Mary Alice made a point of it, and laughed each time they thought I'd stopped. When I was done, what I saw was a bedpan full of blood, not urine. The nurse covered it quickly with paper from the examining table.

  "You don't need to be looking at that."

  Mary Alice helped me lie back down.

  Dr. Husa had me scoot down so she could take the stitches.

  "You'll be sore down here for a few days, maybe a week," Dr. Husa said. "You shouldn't do much, if you can avoid it."

  But I couldn't think in terms of days or weeks. I could only focus on the next minute and believe that with each minute it would get better, that slowly all of this might go away.

  I told the police not to call my mother. Unaware of my appearance, I believed I could hide the rape from her and from my family. My mother had panic attacks in heavy traffic; I was certain my rape would destroy her.

  After the vaginal exam was completed, I was wheeled into a bright white room. This room was used to store large, incredible machines with lifesaving abilities, all shining with stainless steel and spotless fiberglass. Mary Alice had gone back out to the waiting room. I noticed the machines and their details, how clean and new they seemed, because it was the first time I had been alone since the wheels of my rescue were set in motion. I lay on the gurney, naked under the hospital gown, and I was cold. I was not sure why I was there, stored alongside these machines. It was a long time before anyone came.

  It was a nurse. I asked her if I could take a shower in the shower stall in the corner. She looked at a chart on the end of the gurney, which I hadn't known was there. I wondered what it said about me, and pictured the word RAPE, in bold red letters, written diagonally across the page.

  I lay still and took shallow breaths. The Demerol worked hard to relax me but, still dirty, I fought back. Every inch of my skin prickled and burned. I wanted him off of me. I wanted to shower and scrub my skin raw.

  The nurse told me I was waiting for the psychiatrist on call. Then she left the room. It was only fifteen minutes--but with the buggy crawl of contamination spreading over me, it felt very long--when a harried psychiatrist entered the room.

  I thought, even then, that this doctor needed the Valium he prescribed for me more than I did. He was exhausted. I remember telling him I knew about Valium and so he didn't need to explain.

  "It will make you calm," he said.

  My mother had been addicted to it when I was little. She had lectured me and my sister on drugs and as I grew older I understood her fear--that I would get drunk or high and lose my virginity to some fumbling boy. But in these lectures what I always pictured was my vibrant mother diminished somehow, lessened--as if a gauze had been thrown over her sharp edges.

  I couldn't see Valium as the benign drug the doctor made it out to be. I told him this but he pooh-poohed it. When he left the room I did what I knew I would do almost immediately, and crumpled up the prescription to throw it into the waste bin. It felt good to do it. A sort of "fuck you" to the idea that anyone could sweep this thing I'd suffered under the carpet. Even then I thought I knew what could happen if I let people take care of me. I would disappear from view. I wouldn't be Alice anymore, whatever that was.

  A nurse came in and told me she could send in another one of my friends to help me. With the painkillers I would need a nurse or someone else to help me keep my balance in the shower. I wanted Mary Alice, but I didn't want to be mean, so I asked for Tree, Mary Alice's roommate and one of our group of six.

  I waited and as I did, I tried to think of what I could tell my mother--some kind of story that would explain why I was so sleepy. I could not know, despite the doctor's warnings, how sore I would be in the morning, or that an elegant latticework of bruises would appear along my thighs and chest, on the undersides of my upper arms and around my neck, where, days later, at home in my bedroom, I would begin to make out the individual pressure points of his fingertips on my throat--a butterfly of the rapist's two thumbs interlocking in the center and his fingers fluttering out and around my neck. "I'm gonna kill you, bitch. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up." Each repetition punctuated by the smash of my skull against brick, each repetition cutting off, tighter and tighter, the airflow to my brain.

  Tree's face, and her gasp, should have told me that I couldn't hide the truth. But she recovered herself quickly and helped me navigate over to the shower stall. She was uncomfortable around me; I was no longer like her but was other than.

  I think the way I survived in the early hours after the rape was by spiraling the obsession of how not to tell my mother over and over again in my brain. Convinced it would destroy her, I ceased thinking of what had happened to me and worried about her instead. My worry for her became my life raft. I clung to it, coming in and out of consciousness on my way to the hospital, during the internal stitches of the pelvic exam, and while the psychiatrist gave me the prescription for the very pills that had once made my mother numb.

  The shower was in the corner of the room. I walked like a wobbly old lady and Tree steadied me. I was concentrating on my balance and so did not see the mirror to my righ
t until I looked up and I was almost right in front of it.

  "Alice, don't," Tree said.

  But I was fascinated, the way I had been as a child when, in a special room with low light, I saw an exhibit at the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archaeology. It was nicknamed Blue Baby and it was a mummy, with the disintegrated face and body of a child who had died centuries ago. I recognized something alike in it--I was a child as this Blue Baby had been a child.

  I saw my face in the mirror. I reached my hand up to touch the marks and cuts. That was me. It was also an undeniable truth: No shower would wipe the traces of the rape away. I had no choice but to tell my mother. She was too savvy to believe any story I could now fashion. She worked for a newspaper, and she took pride in the fact that it was impossible to pull the wool over her eyes.

  The shower was small and made of white tile. I asked Tree to turn on the water. "As hot as you can," I said.

  I took off the hospital gown and handed it to her.

  I had to grip the tap and a handle on the side of the shower to stay upright. This left me unable to scrub myself. I remember telling Tree I wished I had a wire brush but that even that wouldn't be enough.

  She drew the curtain and I stood there, letting the water beat over me.

  "Can you help me?" I asked.

  Tree pulled the curtain back a few inches.

  "What do you want me to do?"

  "I'm afraid I'll fall down. Can you take the soap and help wash me?"

  She reached through the water and got the large square brick of soap. She drew it down my back, nothing but the bar of soap touching me. I felt the rapist's words, "worst bitch," as I would feel them almost constantly for years when I undressed in front of other people.

  "Forget it," I said, unable to look at her. "I'll do it myself. Just put the soap back."

  She did, then pulled the curtain closed, before leaving.

  I sat down in the shower. I took a washcloth and lathered it up. I scrubbed hard with the rough towel, under a tap so hot my skin had already turned beet red. The last thing I did was put the towel over my face and with both hands rubbed it back and forth over and over again until the cuts and their blood turned the small white towel pink.

  After the hot shower, I dressed in clothes that Tree and Diane had hurriedly selected from the few clean clothes I had. They had forgotten any underwear so I had no bra or underpants. What I did have was a pair of old jeans that I had embroidered flowers on while still in high school and then, when the knees ripped open, had sewn intricate handmade patches on--long strips of pleated paisley and deep-green velvet. My grandmother had labeled them my "rebel" pants. On top, I wore a thin white-and-red-striped blouse. I left the shirttails out, hoping to hide as much as possible of the jeans.