Authors: Laura Fraser
I head to Huntsville, sweltering in the brick red heat, to interview a prisoner. Waiting outside the watchtower with its rolls of razor wire, getting buzzed in and inspected, I know I’m probably safer here than anywhere else, but still. They always make you sign that clause saying it’s not their fault if you’re held hostage and they won’t do anything to help you if you are. When I sit down to interview a young man, in for murder for a hate crime, he is behind a mesh screen, which makes it even more unsettling. The only way to look at him, to make any contact, is to look directly into his pupils, the tiny area inside the screen mesh, which is too intense. I spend my entire time in Texas apprehensive and afraid. It’s unlike me; I’ve been to prisons before, I’ve interviewed someone with Charles Manson sitting at the next table over and kept my cool.
Barely home again, I go to Kansas City, the home of Hallmark Cards, and stay at a chain hotel, as bland and benign a place as you can imagine, to report a story about a divorcée in her fifties who became HIV-positive the first time she slept with another man after twenty-five years of marriage. She was faithful all those years, and the first time she had a fling after her divorce, her first taste of freedom, she paid for it dearly. She’s a former reporter herself, upbeat and intelligent, telling a brave tale, but she is also lonely and frightened. After we have dinner, it occurs to me back in the hotel room that I don’t have anyone to call at home, the phone would just ring.
Her story fills me with another kind of anxiety, and by the time I touch down in San Francisco, I’m fretting that I could be HIV-positive or have some other disease. I call around, frantic,
until I find a clinic that can take me right away to be tested and drive to a far suburb for an exam. When I explain out loud to the nurse practitioner why I need all the tests, the memory of it hits me and I feel queasy. She reassures me and says I’m probably fine (which turns out to be the case). I am relieved that at least I will know. I stop off at a mall on the way back home and buy an expensive pair of Italian sunglasses to replace the ones I lost. I put them on, and things start to look a little better again.
A
T HOME
I feel more urgency than ever to have someone near me, to feel settled. For the first time in my life, I feel that I need, not just want, someone who can look out for me. I am nervous on my own, even walking in the evening around the Haight Ashbury, where I have lived, safely, without incident, for twenty years. Now all of a sudden the homeless people who have been panhandling me for years seem menacing, and the Goths and punks look more threatening than just kids playing dress-up. I take to riding my bicycle more because it’s faster than walking.
I’m annoyed that I feel so fragile. I’ve always imagined myself invulnerable, as though I’ve had a feisty little guardian angel on my shoulder, and now she’s flown off. I may not be as tough as I appear—my eyes glisten while interviewing people who have a difficult story to tell, when I ought to be more of a pro—but I’m usually able to present a strong front to the world. Now I don’t trust that I’m not going to fall apart. I don’t trust myself, period.
It’s a little like when I decided to get married, to trust my heart and entire future to someone, and then was painfully betrayed:
how could I ever trust myself to make a smart choice about a man again? The truth is that I’ve been too afraid, ever since, to even try to be in a relationship, because look what happened last time.
So how can I trust myself to travel alone again? Now I’m anxious just leaving the house. I make plans with my women friends or go out in groups. I put a whistle on my key chain. I’d like to meet a new man, someone who could walk by my side, be a companion, watch my back, but the last thing I can do is go out on a date with a stranger. I stick to my friends, whom I realize I can count on more than I thought.
When I drive down to Monterey one weekend, for instance, my car dies on the way, I’m in the middle of nowhere, and night is falling. Big black vans and Harleys slow down menacingly while passing my little car. I have a soft-top convertible that could be easily slashed and broken into. I call my friend Guillermo in Santa Cruz (we’ve been friends for several years and, since we have the same birthday, always celebrate by cooking for a big party together). He doesn’t hesitate: he rides his motorcycle right down and sits with me in the car, talking about food, until the tow truck arrives. It freaks me out when I climb into the truck that the driver is wearing plastic examining room gloves, under which I can see the outline of a swastika tattoo. I climb right back out and tell Guillermo, who says calm down, he’s an ex-skinhead freak, but we need to get the car back, I’ll ride right along behind the truck. When we get back to Santa Cruz, he makes us big steak sandwiches with focaccia and caramelized onions and we drink a bottle of wine before I head to the guest room. We go
body surfing the next day, and when the waves get rough, I ask him if we should be worried. “The question right now is whether it’s
useful
to be worried,” he says, and so we swim like mad, but I know that as long as I’m with him, I’m in no danger.
At home in San Francisco, my friend Sandra, a woman of Italian–Puerto Rican descent and temperament whom I’ve known for many years, drops by to catch up after my recent trips. She has shared many a glass of wine with me after I’ve broken up with someone or calmed my outrage or confusion after a bad date with her practical, good-hearted advice. She is married with an adopted son; at age thirty-eight, she decided she wanted a husband and family and eventually got them; she’s made a lot of sacrifices for her child, as everyone does, taking full-time jobs when she’d rather be a freelance photographer, considering a move to the suburbs, where the schools are better but where she’ll feel culturally stifled, but she has a clear sense of her priorities and an optimism about her circumstances.
We hug each other, and I give her a fierce-looking Samoan T-shirt for her eight-year-old son. I pour wine and recount my trips to Houston and Kansas City.
“Wait a minute,” says Sandra, interrupting me after a couple of minutes. “Back up. What about Samoa? Who cares about Kansas City? I want to hear about Samoa.”
I tell her the fa’afafine were interesting, the islands were lush and the beaches pristine, but the photographer I worked with was a real asshole, treating me like his photo assistant and the fa’afafine like models. “I was really pissed off, too, because I lost my favorite sunglasses.”
Sandra looks at me quizzically. “You went all the way to
Samoa, and all you can say is that the photographer was an asshole and you lost your sunglasses?” She frowns. “Come on—what’s the matter with you? It’s Samoa! Exotic island paradise! I’d give anything to go there for ten days.”
I shrug. “It was a lot of work, that’s all.” I wipe my eyes.
“What is it?” Sandra knows me too well.
“I had a difficult trip,” I finally say. “That’s all.”
“What?”
I shake my head.
“You can tell me,” says Sandra. She reaches over and puts her hand on my forearm.
It all comes tumbling out—my drunkenness, my stupidity, the surfer on the beach. My fear ever since, the entire summer, not wanting to be alone, not wanting to travel, not being able to trust myself. Until I said it out loud, I didn’t realize I was so upset about the whole thing.
Sandra’s face darkens, and when I stop, she gives me a hug and pushes strands of hair out of my wet face. It’s a relief that a friend knows. Sandra gets up for a box of tissues, offers me one, wipes her own eyes, and refills our glasses.
“Shit,” she says. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say.” She heaves a sigh. “You went to the doctor?”
“I’m fine,” I say. “I had all the tests.” Then, suddenly, outraged: “The only place I could get an appointment right away was in San Rafael. The receptionist at
my
doctor’s office, my fucking
women’s health
clinic, told me it wasn’t an emergency.”
“I’d
call it an emergency.” Sandra is mad, too, which is satisfying.
“Don’t you think?” I say. “I mean, okay, it was a couple of weeks later, but still. It hit me all of a sudden, and I was totally freaked out. I needed to deal with it right then.”
“Of course,” she says in a calmer voice. “Why didn’t you call me?”
It’s hard to explain why I didn’t call her or anyone else. I was too embarrassed even to call the psychologist I used to see, so I wrote her an e-mail, which she never replied to, probably because I’d never written her one before and it went straight into her junk mail. In any case, my shrink’s most memorable line to me ever was “For such a smart woman you sure are stupid about men,” and this incident pretty much proved that point, just adding another dimension to my usual bad judgment. (Later, when I do tell her, she’s helpful, and I realize as usual that I was projecting.)
“I don’t know,” I tell Sandra. “I just couldn’t tell anyone I knew. I did call a crisis line, but I got one of those young women who speak like every sentence is a question? You know, ‘It’s not your fault? You should, like, talk to a therapist? We have resources? You should, like, press charges?’”
Sandra shakes her head.
“I think there should be a crisis line for people who can’t speak in declarative sentences or who say ‘like’ every like other word,” I say. “It’s a complete abuse of the English language.” I’m furious, suddenly, about the way people under thirty say “like” all the time. Something ought to be done. “It makes me fucking
crazy.”
Sandra touches my shoulder. “Relax,” she says. “I don’t think
that’s worth getting so upset about.” She sighs. “So,
did
you call the police?”
“Of course not,” I say, reaching for another tissue. “It was Samoa. What would the police say? You shouldn’t get drunk and walk around with a stranger at night on the beach, you stupid tourist? I mean, I was hanging out with the guy.”
“Being drunk and stupid doesn’t make it your fault.”
“Well, it wouldn’t have happened otherwise.”
Sandra takes a sip of wine. “Are you okay? I mean physically.”
“I pulled something in my hip, that’s all. Ligament or something.”
“Well, that’s lucky.”
Lucky. I wipe my face and blow my nose. “The thing is, I was
so
stupid, completely reckless, getting drunk, taking a walk with that guy.”
“Hey,” says Sandra, firmly. “Stop saying that. So you were partying too much. Big deal. You’re impulsive and spontaneous, and you like to have a good time. That’s what makes you
you.”
“That’s what got me in trouble.”
“Okay, yeah, so you don’t have to get so sloshed when you’re out in another country, and probably you won’t next time, but it might’ve happened anyway,” Sandra says. “The last thing you need to do right now is beat yourself up.”
We sit quietly for a few minutes. “In a way,” I say, sighing, “it’s kind of like just another bad one-night stand. I mean, I’ve ended up in bed with men who were using me, who didn’t care about me, I’ve felt shitty the next day, so what’s the difference?”
Sandra stares at me. “How can you say that?” She’s almost yelling. “You’re right, you
are
being stupid. It’s an assault, okay? An attack. Samoa, wherever, he had no right. You were drunk, fine. That doesn’t mean that being raped doesn’t matter. That’s totally crazy.”
“I don’t want to use that word,” I say coolly. I’m not going to go through life sounding like some kind of a victim. “It’s not like a stranger jumped out of the bushes with a knife. It’s not like I was kidnapped and forced to sell my body on the streets. It wasn’t really a big deal. I knew he wasn’t going to hurt me.”
“He did hurt you,” Sandra says quietly.
“I’m
trying
not to be so upset about it.” I wipe my eyes.
“It’s okay to be upset. You
should
be upset.
I’m
upset.” Sandra is waving her half-Italian hands around. She calms down and uses a big-sister tone. “Blaming yourself is not going to make it okay. You can be angry and scared, and it may keep coming back to you for a long time, and that’s enough for you to deal with. I should know.”
I look up at her brown eyes and deeply knit brow.
Sandra is quiet for a second. “It happened to me, too.”
“You’re kidding.”
Sandra shakes her head. “It was a long time ago. My best friend’s boyfriend, on a vacation in Florida. They were having a fight, and he came into my room to ‘talk’ about it. I got pissed off at him, protecting my friend. He went nuts, beating me up pretty badly. Broke my nose.” She touches the ridge, which I now see is a little crooked.
“Oh, my god. Did you call the police?”
“No. My friend begged me not to.”
“She was sticking up for him?” I shake my head in wonder.
“Battered girlfriend. My mistake was trying to protect her from him, to get her to leave. That’s why I went along in the first place. And I blamed myself for everything.”
“Why the fuck didn’t you turn him in?” I say, raising my voice. “How could you blame yourself? You were just trying to protect a friend. And some
friend
. Jesus.” I can’t believe that happened to Sandra, who is always so cheerful, strong, and practical. Then I’m quieter. “You’ve never told me about it.”
“I don’t think about it very much. But you’d be surprised how many women you know have been raped. Once it happens to you, you hear a lot of stories. It’s like you’re part of a secret club. It takes a long time to get over it, and it affects people in different ways. At least I think with me it’s history.”
“Did it take you a long time to trust men again?”
“I had Paul, who was great. We were already together then. When I told him, he wanted to track the guy down and murder him, but he was wonderful with me. He took good care of me.”
My eyes fill with tears. “I think it’s going to be a long time before I can deal with men again,” I say.
“Maybe,” says Sandra. “But you can’t let it get you down for too long. You have to get your sense of power back. You had a bad experience, but you’re still you, you’re still strong.” She rubs my arm. “Look, you’ll get over this. Just concentrate on doing little things that make you feel better right now. Take baths, eat good food, go to yoga. You don’t have to go traipsing around the world by yourself. Okay?”