On our way home, Steve and I passed by another, posher student hangout. I saw Lila sitting inside with her crush and a bunch of people I didn't know. I told Steve to wait, and I rushed inside with the book. The people at the table looked up.
"This is for you," I said, offering it to Lila. "It's a book."
Her friends laughed because the fact that it was a book was obvious.
"Thank you," Lila said.
A waitress arrived to take drink orders. Lila's crush was watching me.
"I wrote something inside," I said.
As her friends ordered drinks, she looked up at me. I thought she pitied me then." I'll read it later, but thank you. It looks like a good book."
I never saw Lila again.
On the day of graduation, I didn't attend. I couldn't imagine being there, trying to celebrate, seeing Lila and her friends. Marc had a project due. His school wasn't over yet. Steve was at graduation. Mary Alice was there too. I had told my parents I just wanted to get the hell out of Syracuse. They agreed. "The faster, the better," they said.
I packed my remaining possessions in a silver rental car. It was a Chrysler New Yorker; they'd run out of subcompacts. I drove this boat back to Paoli, knowing the car itself would get a laugh out of my parents.
Syracuse was over. Good riddance, I thought. I was going to the University of Houston in the fall. I was going to get an MA in poetry. I would spend the summer trying to reinvent myself. I had not seen Houston, never been south of Tennessee, but it was going to be different there. Rape would not follow me.
Aftermath
The night John got punched in the face was sometime in the fall of 1990. I was standing outside De Robertis on First Avenue, waiting for John to come back with the cheap heroin we both snorted. We had a routine. We always said that if he took too long I would come after him, shouting. It was a vague plan, but it kept from our minds the fact that something might happen that we couldn't control. That particular night it was cold out. But those days cloud together. By that time, this was the point of it all.
A year before, I had published a piece in The New York Times Magazine, a first-person account of my rape. In it, I beseeched people to talk about rape and to listen to articulate victims when they had a story to tell. I got a lot of mail. I celebrated with four dime bags and a Greek boyfriend who had once been my student. Then Oprah called, having read the article. I went on the show. I was the victim who fought back. There was another one who supposedly hadn't. Like Lila's, Michelle's resistance left no visible scars. But I doubt that Michelle flew back home to snort heroin.
I never made it through graduate school in Houston. I didn't like the city, yes, but to be honest, I wasn't cut out for it. I slept with a decathlete and a woman, I bought pot off a guy behind the 7-Eleven, and I drank with another student who also dropped out--a tall man from Wyoming--and sometimes, while the decathlete held me, or the man from Wyoming sat back and watched, I cried in hysterical trills that no one understood, least of all me. I thought it was Houston. I thought it was living in a hot climate where there were too many bugs and where the women wore too many ruffles and frills.
I moved to New York and lived in a minority low-income housing project on Tenth and C. My roommate, Zulma, was Puerto Rican and had raised her family in the apartment. Now she rented out her extra bedrooms. She liked to drink too.
I hostessed at a place in Midtown called La Fondue and then I landed (by meeting a drunk man in a bar called King Tut's Wawa Hut) a teaching job at Hunter College. I was an adjunct. I didn't have the requisite degrees and only a year of experience (I had been a teaching assistant in Houston), but the hiring committee was desperate, and they recognized some names: Tess Gallagher, Raymond Carver. During the interview, I took fifteen minutes to remember the word thesis, as in thesis sentence--the basis of all composition courses. When the chair called and Zulma handed me the phone, I had never been more surprised by what I took then to be the fortuitousness of drinking.
And my students there became the people who kept me alive. I could get lost in their lives. They were immigrants, ethnic minorities, city kids, returning women, full-time workers, former addicts, and single parents. Their stories filled my days, and their troubles in assimilating preoccupied my evening hours. I fit in with them in a way I had never fit in since before the rape. My own story paled when I compared it with theirs. Walking over the bodies of their countrymen to escape Cambodia. Watching a brother be stood against a wall and shot. Raising a handicapped child alone on waitressing tips. And then there were the rapes. The girl who had been adopted for the purpose by her father, who was a priest. The girl who was raped in the apartment of another student, and whom the police didn't believe. The girl who was a militant and tattooed dyke but who broke down in my office when she told me about her gang rape.
They told me their stories, I like to think, because I never questioned them, believed them utterly. They also thought I was a clean slate. I was obviously a middle-class white girl. A college teacher. Nothing had ever happened to me. I was too hungry for comfort to care that it was a one-way relationship. Like a bartender, I listened, and like a bartender, my position kept me at a safe remove. I was the ear, and the tragic stories of my students' lives medicated me. But I began to build up a resistance to them. By the time I wrote the article for The New York Times, I was ready to talk. Some students read it. They were shocked. Then came Oprah. Many more saw me there, holding forth, their English teacher, on her own rape. For the next few weeks I ran into former students on the street. "Wow," they would confide, "I never thought you, I mean, you know." And I did know. Because I was white. Because I grew up in the suburbs. Because without a name attached to my story, it remains fiction, not fact.
I loved heroin. Drinking had drawbacks--namely, the volume needed to reach oblivion--and I didn't like the taste or the history--my mother had done that. Cocaine made me sick. I went into paralytic cramps once on the floor of a club called the Pyramid. Rastas and white girls danced around my curled-up body. I did it a few more times just to double-check. Ecstasy and mushrooms and acid trips? Who wanted to enhance a mood? My goal was to destroy it.
I found myself in odd places. Vacant lots, alleyways, and Athens. One night I came to from a nod in a tiny cafe in Greece. In front of me, on a dish, were small silvery fish. Two men were sopping up the oil from my plate with bread. We went back to a house on a hill. I heard the name of my Greek student mentioned but he wasn't there. We smoked black tar and walked outside again. One of the men disappeared, the other wanted to sleep with me. I had been on American TV.
At the same house, with a new population shooting up in the back, I put on someone's jacket because I was cold. There was a used needle in the pocket. It stabbed me. I was startled for a moment, immediately I thought, AIDS, then I did what I had become good at: played the odds. It was Greece. How bad could the risk be?
After thirty days I went home. I wrote a travel article for The New York Times, which appeared the following spring in time for people to plan their vacations. In the meantime, I flew back to Europe with another former student, John. He and a friend had scammed cheap tickets to Amsterdam through the friend's relative. We took the night train, high as kites, into Berlin. The wall was falling. It was after midnight by the time we reached the concrete separating West from East. John and Kippy pitched in. They borrowed a pickax from a group of raucous and euphoric German men and took their turns. I stayed at a remove. This wasn't my country and I was the only woman among men. A German man came over and offered me a cigarette, a bottle, said something to me, and grabbed my ass. Up along the wall, an East German border guard stared down.
It was sometime after that in New York that John was hit. I remember seeing him round the corner. He had been gone longer than usual. I could see his glasses were missing and his nose was bloodied. He was upset.
"Did you get it?" I asked.
He nodded his head. Didn't speak. We started walking.
"I got hit."
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This, like the needle in Athens, startled me. The question was: How bad did it have to get? I didn't want John to cop alone anymore and made a point of that. He tried not to, but sometimes, when we were desperate, he went.
It got much worse, and then, in the spring of 1991, having just moved into an apartment on Seventh Street, something clicked. Something was wrong with me but I didn't know what. I lay in bed. I ate again, as I hadn't since college, and I wore my old flannel nightgowns. The boxes from the move remained unpacked. John was working grueling hours. He was uncomfortable around me now. When he came over I sent him out to buy me brownies. I gained weight. I stopped caring about what I looked like or how fast I could walk at a clip to a club. I wanted to be better but I didn't know how.
A friend of mine I'd known since we were teenagers called to say I'd been quoted in a book. My friend was a doctor now, and he worked in Boston. My New York Times piece had been quoted in Trauma and Recovery, by Dr. Judith Lewis Herman. I laughed at this. I had wanted to write my own book but I couldn't seem to manage it. Now, almost ten years after Lila's rape, my name had appeared as a footnote in another person's. I thought about buying it but it was hardback--too pricey--and besides, I thought, I was done with all that.
In the next six months, John and I stopped seeing each other, I joined a gym, and I got a therapist. John kept using. Part of me wanted him back so desperately I did humiliating things. I begged. Part of me knew he was killing himself. First Avenue became a line I wouldn't cross. I felt the pull of my old neighborhood was too strong to resist and so, when an opportunity came to spend two months in California at a rural artists' colony, I took it.
Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, which sits in the mountains of rural, redneck California, is rustic by anyone's standards. The cabins are constructed of cinder blocks and plywood. There is no electricity. It is run on a shoestring budget.
When I arrived, I was met by a man named Robert Willis. Bob. He was in his early seventies. He wore a white felt Stetson, Wranglers, and a denim shirt. He had silver hair and blue eyes and was chivalrous but disinclined to talk.
He lit my propane lamp, came up the next day to check on me, drove me to town for food. He'd been there a long time and had seen a lot of people come and go. Odd as it was, we became friends. I told him about New York and he talked about France. He lived there half the year, in a similar caretaking capacity, on a horse farm. Eventually, in his cabin, after dark, by the light of the propane lamp, I told him about my rape and Lila's. He listened, saying only a few words. "That must have hurt." "You never get over certain things."
He told me about serving as an infantryman in World War II and losing all his buddies. Years later, in the winter of 1993, in France, he had stared out a window down at a tree.
"I don't know what it was," he said. "I had seen that tree from that window hundreds of times, but I started sobbing like a baby. On my knees sobbing, like you'd never seen. I felt ridiculous but I couldn't stop myself. While I was doing it, I realized it was my buddies, that I had never cried for them. They were all buried in a graveyard in Italy near a tree like that, so far away. I just lost it. Who would have thought something that happened that long ago could have such power?"
Before I left, we had dinner one last time. He made what he called army vegetables--canned corn and canned tomatoes heated up on the stove--and bacon. We drank cheap wine, jug cheap.
Dorland could be a spooky place in the daylight. At night it was pitch black, only a few kerosene or propane lights dotting the hill. After dinner, as we sat on the porch of his cabin, we saw what Bob took to be a truck's lights on the dirt road that led up from the highway.
"Looks like we've got a visitor," Bob said.
But then the truck's lights went off. We didn't hear it move.
"You wait here," he told me. "I'm going to investigate."
He went into the back and got his rifle from where he kept it hidden from the fragile liberal arts colonists and Dorland's board of directors.
"I'm going to circle back through the brush and come up on the road," he whispered.
"I'll shut off the light."
I stood absolutely still on the porch. I strained to hear anything, gravel under a tire, a twig snapping, anything. In my mind the men in the truck had hurt or killed Bob, and now they were advancing toward the cabin. But I had made a promise to Bob. I would not move.
Moments later I heard a rustle in the leaves on the far side of the cabin. I started.
"It's me," Bob's whisper came through the dark. "Stay still."
We watched the road. We never saw the lights on the truck go on. Eventually, Bob stepped through the chaparral with Shady, his faithful wolf-malamute, and we lit the propane light again. Both of us were amped up, went through the course of events a dozen times, shared our perception of it, talked about threat and how you could sense it. How we were lucky for war and rape because it gave us something no one else had: a sixth sense that turned on when we felt danger near us or those we loved.
I went back to New York, but not the East Village. Too many memories. I moved with a boyfriend to 106th Street between Manhattan and Columbus.
My parents had visited me twice in ten years on my home turf. My mother had stood in an apartment of mine and said, "You can't tell me you want to spend the rest of your life this way." She was talking real estate and apartment size but they were words, as I came to repeat them, that took on a different meaning for me.
That fall I quit dabbling in heroin. It had as much to do with losing easy access to it as it did with anything. I drank again and smoked cigarettes but so did everyone. Then I bought Dr. Herman's book. It was out in paper. I reasoned I should have a record of anyplace my name appeared in print.
Herman chose to use one sentence from my article at the beginning of her chapter called "Disconnection." The sentence, as it appeared, is this: "When I was raped I lost my virginity and almost lost my life. I also discarded certain assumptions I had held about how the world worked and about how safe I was." It appeared on page fifty-one of a three-hundred-page book. I read the sentence and my name again in the bookstore before purchasing it. It was not obvious to me until I was riding home on the subway. In a book called Trauma and Recovery, I was cited in the first half. I decided not just to keep the book as a memento, but to actually read it.
They do not have a normal "baseline" level of alert but relaxed attention. Instead, they have an elevated baseline of arousal: their bodies are always on the alert for danger. They also have an extreme startle response to unexpected stimuli ... People with post-traumatic stress disorder take longer to fall asleep, are more sensitive to noise, and awaken more frequently during the night than ordinary people. Thus traumatic events appear to recondition the human nervous system.
Paragraphs like this began the most gripping read I had ever had: I was reading about myself. I was also reading about war veterans. Unfortunately, my brain went into overdrive again. I spent a week in the main reading room of the New York Public Library plotting a novel that would use PTSD as the great equalizer, bringing together women and men who suffered from the same disorder. But then, in the midst of the narratives I read, I lost the will to intellectualize it.
There was a collection of first-person accounts of Vietnam that I read over and over again and kept on reserve. Somehow, reading these men's stories allowed me to begin to feel. One particularly affected me, the story of a hero. He had seen heavy action, and watched as his friends were cut down. He bore it all stoically. I couldn't help but think of Bob.
This vet got home, received decoration, held down a job. Years later, he fell apart. Something gave. The hero could not hold. He became a man by crumbling. The account left off in process. He was out there somewhere, working on it. I'm not part of any religion but I prayed for that vet and for Bob.
I read Herman's entire book. It wasn't a magical cure but it was a start. I also had a good therapist. She had actually used the words post-traumatic stress a yea
r before but I had dismissed them as so much psychobabble. True to form, I did everything the hard way: wrote a column, got it quoted, bought the book, and recognized myself in the case histories of the sick. I had post-traumatic stress disorder, but the only way I would believe it was to discover it on my own.
While I was living on 106th, my boyfriend worked late bartending, and I spent the evenings alone. I watched a lot of television. It was an old tenement house in a bad neighborhood. It was what I could afford in New York City on an adjunct's salary. I lived behind gated windows, and the nights were regularly peppered with automatic fire. Tech-9's were the gun of choice in the neighborhood then.
One night I'd turned the toaster on while coffee was brewing. I blew a fuse. The fuse box was down in the basement. I had to go outside and down a dark stairwell to get there. I called my boyfriend at work. He was brusque. A large crowd had just entered the bar. "What do you want me to do about it? Take a flashlight and do it or sit in the dark. Those are your choices."
I decided I was being stupid, helpless. I used something I had learned in therapy, "inner talking," to psyche myself up for the chore. It was around 11:00 P.M. I reasoned this was not as bad as 2:00 A.M. To say the least, my inner talking was faulty.
Down two flights and out into the street, around the corner, over a wrought-iron gate whose lock had rusted shut, down the outdoor stairs, turn on the flashlight. I found the keyhole, inserted the key, got inside. I turned the latch on the inside and stood for a moment against the wall. My heart was racing. It was pitch black and windowless in the basement. My flashlight trailed across a far wall with rooms tunneling into the back. I made out the possessions of a Dominican man who had been evicted a month or two before. I heard rats squeaking in annoyance as my light discovered them. Focus, I said to myself, the glass fuse cold in my hand, and then I heard a noise. I shut off my light.