Denial (24 page)

“So my dad leaves. My mother falls apart. I start eighth grade, and then in March I get raped. My mother dies. And now, many years later, my marriage was falling apart. It brought back all these earlier wounds,” she says, the many causes of the pain in her abdomen all jumbling out at once.

“Ever since the rape I have felt afraid to be alone in a big house like this. I slept in my mother's room for years. If I was home alone at night, I would hear things. Dark big house, people in the big house…” She tells me that the place she felt safest was a studio apartment in New York City. “It was tiny,” she says. “On the sixteenth floor. No place to hide.”

Lucy has not told her two teenage boys that she had been raped. We talk about the pros and cons. I wonder whether children sense something, but don't know what they sense; whether they might imagine that they are somehow to blame for their mother's fear.

“Do you think the rape might have changed the way you were as a mother?” I ask. Of course I want to know the answer to this question for myself: How might it affect how I parent my son?

“I don't worry that they're going to be raped,” she says, answering a question I haven't asked. “They are huge strapping boys. But I worry that something bad will happen to them. Of course it's unlikely, but so was what happened to me.

“How likely was it in 1971 that a thirteen-year-old girl would get raped at gunpoint with her mother and nine other women in
the house? Even today, in my old neighborhood, in Cambridge, this sort of thing doesn't happen. It was something we couldn't even imagine back then.

“I am overprotective,” she adds. She tells me about a chess coach her boys had; that she sensed that he was a predator. “I didn't get a good feeling around him,” she says. “I didn't want the boys to be with him.”

“How did your husband react to that?” I ask.

“He thought I was being overly paranoid,” she says. “He was dismissive.

“But I never let my kids be with the chess coach by themselves. They would say, ‘Mom, he's not a pedophile.' It turned out that he was. He's now in federal prison.”

She may have been paranoid, but her intuition was correct. Does it take a victim to recognize a predator before anyone else does?

“How did your husband react when you told him you were raped?” I ask.

“He was compassionate. I think he felt bad about it, but it wasn't real to him.

“For many years, I felt ashamed of myself. Ashamed of my own body.”

I see her looking out the window, trying to look away from an uncomfortable feeling.

I want to protect Lucy. She looks so slim and vulnerable. And today, while we are talking, I see a little girl.

But at the same time, in this moment, I will confess that I feel superior to Lucy. Emotionally healthier. More grown-up.

I am not aware of feeling ashamed of my own body in the way she describes. But I am aware of feeling ashamed of this feeling I have now, this slightly superior, competitive feeling with Lucy.

Now that I hear about the possibility of harboring this kind of shame, I imagine that I must have it, too. Like the medical stu
dents who imagine themselves with laryngitis, leukemia, lymphoma, every disease in the medical textbook. Perhaps I have repressed the feeling of shame over my own body. Perhaps I have muffled it. Or “forgotten” the many times I've been aware of feeling it.

But now, reading over my notes, I realize that this need I have to clean things—not so much when they are dirty as when I'm in the mood—might be connected with shame. This morning, for example, sweeping the hearth, I was determined to get the ashes from the spaces between the bricks. After I swept the hearth, I swept the leaves off the porch. Then I wiped off the kitchen counters, which were clean, with orange-scented soap.

“Why is rape so shaming?” I ask her. I am certain that rape is shaming, though I'm less aware of feeling ashamed of my body than Lucy is.

But now, again reading over my notes, I think back to the period before the rape. I was dancing a lot back then. Ballet and modern. The feeling of soaring. So much music in my life. After the rape, I remember the shift in my posture. Somehow I noticed it, as if I could stand outside myself and observe. The shoulders slumping forward, as if I had something to hide. How long did it take for me to shift from dancer's posture to the posture of a victim?

And now that I've uttered that word, I am truly ashamed. I did not have the posture of a victim. I was not a victim. I was just raped.

“People say that rape is not sex, that it's violence,” Lucy says, bitterly. “But it's also sex. You can't get around that,” she says. “He didn't run me over with a car. He had sex with me. You're not supposed to do that. You're not supposed to have sex with an eighth-grader. You're not supposed to have sex when you're in eighth grade. It was very intimate. You can't get around it. This part of the body,” she says, gesturing from her heart to her lower
abdomen, though I understand she means to indicate her vagina. “If you're sitting around with a group of women, talking about various traumas, someone will say, I got beaten by my mother. But if you say, I got raped, it's a different thing.”

I wonder if that is true. Is rape really the worst sort of violation? I'm not sure. I often wonder why it matters whether we're penetrated or not. There is the pain, but the pain doesn't last. The shame does.

And I realize that for me, rape didn't seem like sex. It seemed like a discharge of shame, an exchange of pain. Rape changes ones sexuality. Of course it does. It must. I'm terrorized when men are attracted to me. But I cannot write about my sexuality. I feel too vulnerable. I am afraid that if I call attention to myself in that way, I might be raped again.
⁴

Now I want to ask her about her memory of the rape itself.

“What do you remember about the gun?” I ask, wondering if she remembers a white handle.

“I remember a short dark gun,” she says. I sense her entering the memory now. My body tenses. I will myself to stay alert.

“It was March fifteenth. I remember because it was the ides of March. It was unseasonably warm. The windows were open. It felt like an early summer day. It was too hot.”

I ask Lucy if she dislikes this kind of heat now, when it's unseasonably hot. “I love the heat,” she says. But I don't believe her.

“I remember that I walked home with my friends from Harvard Square. We all had dinner. Or maybe we had dinner in the square, I'm not sure. I know there were eleven of us in the house at the time. There were my two sisters. Jen had two friends over. There was my mother's friend Polly. My friends. That makes nine. We may have had two other girls living in the house. We often had kids staying with us. So there were all these women in the house. I went upstairs…. I was raped at eight fifteen,” she says.

She pauses. I can see that she is trying to get this right.

“That's right,” she says, a faraway look in her eye. “It was our spring vacation. There was no school then. So I came up to my room. I don't remember where I got undressed. I went into my mother's bathroom. I took a shower in her bathroom. I must have wanted to use her stuff, or maybe because it was a better shower.

“I turn the shower off and step out,” she says. She has switched to present tense. “As soon as I step out, I see a man wearing a dark blue slicker and a black mask with cutout eyes. It looked like a ski mask. He had very blue eyes.”

We are back in the past.

“I thought he was a friend of my sister's, making a joke. I reacted that way at first. He had a gun. I said to him, ‘What are you doing? Get out,' still thinking it was a joke. He didn't respond accordingly. That was the moment that I realized that he was a man that was nobody I knew.”

Why did the police have such a hard time believing my sister and me that the man who raped us was “nobody we knew”?

And now she says, “I remember that feeling coming over me—”

Lucy looks out the window. She is bothered by a noise, which I haven't heard.

“This house is too big for me,” she says. “They are chopping down the trees outside.”

She runs outside for a moment. Men from the telephone company, she says.

She returns, back to the too-big house. I see a faraway look in her eye now. It seems to me that her features are slightly altered.

“Is this really okay?” I ask.

She assures me that she's fine. She returns to her story.

“At the moment when I realized that he was nobody I knew…”

She pauses. I hear the ticking of the clock. She finds her way back to her story.

“There is the moment when the blanket went over me, of disconnection with my body. Like I was almost floating at that point. I don't remember exactly what he said, other than telling me, Don't say anything. He told me to go through my mother's room. To go out the door of her room and through the door into mine. There was a lock on the door from years before. A bolt lock. All I had on was a towel. He told me to lie down on my bed. My room had two beds in it. I don't know how he knew which was my bed. I can't remember what he did with the gun….” She pauses.

I wonder to myself, Is she considering now whether she might have been able to grab the gun, might have been able to kill him? Whether she might have tried to run away when he put the gun down? I don't ask these questions. I am afraid to interrupt her narrative. I do not believe I would be able to remember as much as Lucy has if I didn't have the material I wrote down for the police at the time. I would probably not know what happened to me. I would have forgotten.

“I remember he got something out of his pocket. It was a tube of junk,” she says. What a harsh word, I think, the hardness of that final
k
. I feel the pain and the shame of the cold ointment on her vagina, the vagina of a thirteen-year-old girl.

I can see that she cannot describe what the “junk” was. Somehow it is this “junk” that horrifies her more than anything.

“He put it on me and on him,” she says. She looks far away. Her hand floats up to cover her mouth.

She recovers herself. “I said to him, Are you going to rape me?”

I notice Lucy's long, lean legs, stretched out onto the stool in front of us. Her anger gives her strength, I think to myself. She will live through this.

“And then I don't remember what he said.”

She pauses again. There is some thought here that is too painful to capture out loud.

“I do remember feeling his penis,” she says.

I am shocked awake by that word
penis
. It sounds so technical, so grown-up. It seems so out of keeping with the way Lucy has been speaking until this point.

“It was very, very painful. Like he was forcing something that is too big into a too-small hole,” she says.

I do not like this word
hole
, referring to a child's vagina. I want to edit her recollections for her, but I don't.

“I don't remember the act itself,” she says. And then adds quickly, “Then he got up and I think he just went out.”

I see her switch again. She is finished with something; she is ready to be done with this topic.

I ask her whether she remembers having to put other clothing on, whether she remembers any stones.

“He didn't make me do anything other than what I just said,” she says. “He didn't spend a lot of time; there were other people in the house.” Perhaps he couldn't take the risk that she would scream. There was no one there to muffle her mouth.

“I remember that I lay there for a little bit. On my bed. Maybe ten seconds or a minute. I opened my door. I remember the feeling—a kind of cloud of haze. But when I got to the bottom of the stairs, I started to scream.”

She continues, “I started screaming, ‘I got raped.' At first they thought I got cut in the shower.

“After that I don't remember very much.” I see a quiver of pain in her eye, but no tears.

“I do remember one awful thing, though,” she says. “The bedpan. I remember getting into a cruiser and going down to the hospital. We went to MGH. I don't know why we didn't go to Mt. Auburn, the hospital nearby. They examined me. They pulled
a curtain around me. I remember thinking that other people might be able to see me, that I wasn't well protected. They put a hard bedpan under my bottom, to raise up my body, so they could see. It's hard to believe that they would do that to a little girl. A cold, hard bedpan, under me. Why did they do that?

“I have my ER record. We had to get prescriptions. I'm not sure what for. I know I had to take the morning-after pill. I threw up all of the next day.

“My father took me to the hospital.” She hands me the report.

When I gave Lucy the list of dates and times of the rapes that had occurred in her neighborhood in 1971, she was furious. If only the police had informed the neighborhood, she said, she probably would not have been raped. There had been eleven incidents in an eight-block area in the neighborhood of Radcliffe, prior to Lucy's rape.

“You would have thought that the police would want everyone to know that there had been a series of rapes in the neighborhood, to make sure everyone knew, to protect the other girls,” she says, angry again.

I wonder, Do I sound angry about my rape? Do I still come across as matter-of-fact?

“But when we asked the chief of police at Harvard,” she says, referring to a conversation she had had with him after she and I started communicating, “he said that it was just a different time. People saw rape differently back then. And for the police—it was soon after the protests. They had different priorities.

“I think he also meant that the officers were not as equipped psychologically to deal with rape as they are now,” Lucy adds. We are back in the present.

“When I saw the photograph, I knew that it was my rapist. It was his eyes and his pockmarked neck. His eyes were very bright.”