I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (6 page)

In the beginning, when I fight, it’s like being underwater after a big wave, unable to find which way is up, holding my breath. I push as hard as I can, but the weight is like rocks, heavy furniture, unmoving, as though I’m buried in the lock. I push again, from some other place, as if I’m pushing to be born, shocked it’s not enough. The dark the dark of underground. I stop pushing.

My body’s empty, lungs like handkerchiefs flat inside my chest. I breathe something that’s not air, not struggling. My eyes work. I might be inside the earth or slightly above it—it’s a cave, spacious. I can imagine my girl body on the floor of the house, shoulders tight. In the cave a light appears at the edge of my vision, like birds in flight. With a current that pulls me, promising everything, except my body. The need to give in to the pull of the light
reminds me of the overwhelming need to push when Tommy was born. For the first time, I’m not hard on the girl body that I see, admiring how she’s knit together, torso tanned, white where the bikini top cups her like hands, a string of unsunned skin white around her neck glowing.

Once that body fit in a single gold chair with her brother, white socks on their feet, chair so big it is like a throne. She has a pink coat with gold buttons, and her father had wanted to name her Aurora, the name of the sun rising, so that she would always know how happy he was the day she was born. This is the opposite of dawn. This girl, in this room, could be leaves in the woods, an arm poking out. Grass growing out of her mouth.

Once in a story, a girl was shot, through a door—she’d been dancing outside, announcing a child. In a year, someone in a recovery meeting will say, “I think you would like this story,” and hand me a copy of the
Paris Review
. In the story, if you want to live, if you wish it before dying, you can come back. Before she hit the ground, a girl had wanted to live, and so she came back, in another state. When, earlier in the story, the narrator finds the girl in an empty room, cutting herself—blood on her arms, I feel as though I am the girl and the narrator. After the girl in the story dies, it’s years before she comes back. When she does, she’s a child, and the narrator is still an adult. But they recognize each other, and nothing—not the self-mutilation, or death, or geographical distance, or age—keeps them from being able to see. I know my son isn’t lost to me. I know no one is ever lost. But this story is someone else believing that and telling me so. I want to be able to write like this. I’ll read the story sitting cross-legged on my canopy bed, weeping, near hysterical, as if I could finally see a world I knew existed. Reading it, I’ll start to spin—unable to face any one direction for more than a few moments. Maybe as in the story, when I’m dying, my love for my girl body counts as a wish.

In the house, the three men, unaware that the girl they raped and suffocated has died, are sleeping when I come back from the cave. I died and came back to life. I don’t know how long they continued to suffocate me after I lost consciousness from lack of oxygen. How many more minutes it would have taken before I was gone for good. I don’t remember coming back. Suddenly it’s morning. As if some angel had put his mouth to mine and breathed, like radar echo from birds or rain. Brought my soul back, a blue shadow, into my body. But the girl I’d been is gone.

In meetings, people would talk about the terrible things that haven’t happened yet, but can if an alcoholic keeps drinking. I’d thought I would always be able to save myself. I remember a man in meetings who killed another person while in a blackout, who woke up in jail. But I thought those things only happened to other people. When I saw that man, who got out of prison after many years, he was so kind. Always willing to help other alcoholics. At first I didn’t know his story, just thought he was one of the successful people who knew how to do the steps. Sometimes I thought he looked down on me for my failure to stay sober. I didn’t understand that he could see me because we were the same. When someone would mention the promises—“we are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness”—I could feel a road ahead open up. I believed it was true, but thought that was just for other people too.

I need to get out of this house. I’m in shock, but some part of me is in charge. First, I need clothes. The turquoise shirt with black polka dots is torn up one side, but they never bothered to take it off. No skirt. I put my legs into a pair of Levi’s belonging to one of the men. Pull them up. Too big. The man wakes up, complains.

They let me dress. They drive me to my car, but my keys are gone, my purse. Alone, walking, I sing a song from long ago in
my head. Gone with my purse is my wallet with the photo of my son, photo of myself as child. I’d kept them side by side—the same face nineteen years apart, mine black-and-white, his in color. My grandmother gave me the photos after he died.

After an hour of walking in the morning heat, the pastel Sunday people speeding by, I pass the train car restaurant where I no longer work. I’d dressed like a dancer there, all the hostesses, cocktail waitresses in black leotards, silky black skirts, slippers. My body like a black lake. A painter once said the body is most beautiful at the joints: the shoulders, neck, elbows, wrists, hips, knees, and ankles—and the back and breasts. Where we’re glued together.

Highway grit’s inside my sandals. The only person I know in this town is Danny, the father of my child. The sun scratching my eyes makes me want to close them. Mascara smeared down my face in old tears. I want to lie down on the roadside. My skin is pinpricked, stuck. It aches in large, flat areas—my thighs and stomach thud. My back. Inside something taut’s abraded, cut like a plum. I haven’t been to his house in three years. Not since the early months of my pregnancy when we’d briefly reunited after he’d called. Said he loved me and wanted his parents to adopt my baby. But after three days, I broke it off again—I wasn’t in love; I didn’t want to be in his grip. I’d started to think that maybe I could keep my baby, raise him myself.

Danny’s house is past the train restaurant, on the opposite side of the highway. I’m still not positive I’ve got the right street, until I see his face at the bedroom window, long hair flat from his pillow, eyes sleepy, watching me walking on his wet grass, as if he’s been waiting all this time, expecting me.

Waiting, as though he’s got the heightened senses of a cat, even though his brother told me he’d tried to kill himself with Old Grand-Dad and phenobarbital after I broke off the engagement,
after I refused to have an abortion, and later refused to give his parents the baby, after I told him it wasn’t his child, after I’d tried to run him down in the train restaurant parking lot when he barred my way, pregnant. He’d grabbed my wrist and turned it, like a mean game to see how much I could take, the twisting like a rug burn. I hadn’t known what I would do with a baby inside, running to my car. He stood in front of the hood, and I gunned it, imagined him bouncing off. The British architect I’d been dating pulled him out of the way.

This is his parents’ house. They are somewhere in these rooms. I met him when I was eighteen. He picked fights. When I first saw him, he was leaning against the wall at the ABC bar, face bloody and swollen. Told me he’d eaten a coral snake, the most deadly, cooked it on the sidewalk as a child. He kept a gun in the glove box, and had lied so long about his age, he forgot how old he was. Cried when he found out he’d lost a year.

Once he drank forty ounces of beer and threatened to shoot my ex who’d worked with me at Dino’s Pizza. Once I couldn’t see him because I had laundry to do, so he washed my clothes. My brother found him at the kitchen sink, hand-washing my underwear in Ivory Liquid. He’d make dinner for me, vegetarian chili that tasted of can, set a place at the long table in his parents’ house; then, he’d sit at one end and watch me eat. When we drank, we pitched fits that stopped only with blood. The breaking of glass would sober him up. But sometimes I’d cut myself anyway, to show him how wrong he’d been, to make it worse. Even sober, it was a lot of riding around in the back of a truck at the beach, or lying flat on my back in his claustrophobic El Camino with poppers, like having sex in a double-wide coffin.

He waves me around to his front door. Lets me in, down the hall to his bedroom. “I’ve been raped,” I say. He sits on his bed.
“You always did hang out with the wrong people,” he says. “And you never knew how to drink.” His tone suggests I’ve had a minor car accident. It doesn’t occur to me that he’s calm because he’s got me, he’s got me. He says, “I’m in community college. Taking music.” He holds a guitar in his hands now, strums it. Since I last saw him our son was born; our son died. “Can I use the bathroom?” “Use my mom’s,” he says. “It’s across the hall.” His parents’ bedroom is empty, dark even in the day. I’m afraid to take my clothes off in this house, shower. I run water. Splash my face. Brush my teeth with my finger, paste.

Back in his bedroom, he kisses me. “I need a ride home,” I say. He kisses me again. I can visualize a metal spoon, a utensil lying on a table, the way it’s used but stays contained. I pretend to be silverware. He tries to lift my shirt over my head, but the shirt’s fitted, and even torn, resists. He’s tugging at it when his dad knocks on the door, comes in, says, “You need to clean the pool.” His dad has a cockatoo on his shoulder.

Danny gives me a T-shirt and shorts. I change in the bathroom. We walk through the dark living room to the sliding glass, outside to the pool. His mother will invite me to stay for breakfast. Cheese omelets and bran muffins. I’ll know I just have to get through it, so I can be driven home. I’ll stare at the daisies on the kitchen curtain and remember a story Danny told me when we were dating. His friends had told him that they’d picked up a girl in a bar the night before. They’d taken her out in one of the boys’ four-wheel trucks and raped her. Then they drove her to the middle of Apopka and tossed her naked into the street. It was funny to these boys that, left vulnerable, she might come to more harm. As if she weren’t even human.

To clean the pool, Danny drags a vacuum slash broom along the walls, scraping them. The weight of the water makes him work
in slow motion. His dogs run in circles around me. I’m trying not to tip over on the white concrete around the pool. It’s blinding me, and his dad is saying words I can’t understand. I’m nodding, but the bird on his shoulder is too bright, yellow flames coming out of his white head.

How to survive the violence itself as it’s happening, that isn’t what I mean. The drive to your skull, the way your bones use all their white hardness. Brain singing with neurons like a city at night. Not the siren of adrenaline shots, the frenzy of the body. It’s a gift if you live. You’re only so big. A man of a certain size, attacking, and it’s like being buried alive.

But I don’t mean that physical fight and mental scrabbling. Breathing again. The attacker(s) saying “I just want to be friends.” Walking home in someone else’s clothes. I don’t mean the walk or how you got the clothes or how you found a key to your apartment with your purse gone. I mean when you get home, bed quiet, made. It looked like my bed itself was sleeping. Filmy pink bedspread I’d had since I was a girl, folded like a gown. I was that girl’s heavy ghost. I showered, got under the sheets that looked like a desert, waves of pink and tan.

Waking up is panic. You don’t want it to be, and it is anyway. The day after I was raped, I had to go to work at the juice bar in the health food store. It’s hectic at lunchtime, a long line for sandwiches. I tell the restaurant manager, “I have to leave early, for the doctor’s. I’ve been raped.” The manager says, “Okay.” Squarish body, tall yellow hairdo. She’ll never ask a word about the rape.

I don’t have an appointment—didn’t schedule the rape a month
in advance—but I drive to the military base. At the gate, I show my laminated ID card, and the sailor in his whites waves me in. It’s been more than a year since I was in the alcohol treatment center on this base, but I’m still a military dependent. I still go to the Dry Dock meeting, but haven’t been able to put any time together. The Queen of Going Back Out. When I’m at that meeting, I just want to breathe the steadiness in. My doctor is in Family Practice. Behind the semicircle desk are two nurses and a receptionist. “I’ve been raped,” I say mechanically. The three women freeze. I feel I should have prepared them. It’s like a science fiction show in which I’ve zapped them to keep them in place while I do some thinking.

When things start moving again, I’m in my doctor’s office. I don’t know how I got there. He has a sports bag under his desk. From the TV rape movies, I expect an examination. He doesn’t examine me. His mouth moves. I say something back. But it’s like there’s no sound. He picks up a black receiver to phone the police. Before the rape, I’d been drunk, blacked out. I’d tried to remember the street sign, the house where I’d been taken. But even though I’d stared from the car window as I’d been driven away, where I’d been only got brighter and brighter. Until all I saw was glare. I imagine telling the policeman about glare.

My doctor’s face is red, shiny. His fingers mess up the part in his straight brown hair. It’s easy to do—flyaway baby hair. I stand up, lean over his desk, say “No.”

“What do you mean?” he asks. I didn’t know. Things were out of order. My doctor’s head is like a ball, his whole body has a rolypoly look, even with the gym bag under the desk, the appearance of exercise. “Then what do you want me to do?” he asks. He looks concerned. I hadn’t imagined the specifics of the visit, just a sort of medicinal cleansing, a bacteria killer like the red antiseptic you pour on wounds. A foamy green bath of pHisoderm like they gave me to wash with before touching my baby.

I say, “Nothing. It’s okay. I’m okay.”

This is 1983. Years before, a local bodybuilder, Edward Keaton, finds a drunk girl vomiting and staggering outside JJ Whispers, a club on Lee Road in Winter Park, Florida. This is just down the road from the juice bar where I work. Years before, Keaton and his wife offer the girl a ride home, and she wakes up blindfolded, half-naked, and sick on the couple’s apartment floor. For five hours.
Choked into compliance, she escaped in the morning when the Keatons escorted her to her car
. The girl ran home, and her mother called the police. The defense lawyer will say that the girl had
trumped up charges because she was embarrassed about having had lesbian sex
. But the bodybuilder gets sent to prison for life: kidnapping, five counts of sexual battery, two counts of battery, and one count of unlawful interception of oral communication—he’d taped the whole thing. As star witness, saying she’d been ordered to rape the girl, his wife gets five years.