Authors: Robin Brande
The Value of Keeping Your Head
My favorite book in the Bible isn’t
even in my Bible. It’s in one I found at Posie’s. I guess some religions feel
differently about which stories should make the cut.
It’s called the Book of Judith, and
it’s about this pious widow named Judith who gets sick of all the weak men
around her giving in to the enemy commander Holofernes. So she makes them a
deal: within five days she will rescue her city from their enemies, if only
the people will pray for her.
Then she puts away her widow’s
black, and rubs her body with luscious oils and fixes her hair and puts on her
finest clothes and jewelry. She fills a bag with enough food for the next few
days, and then she and her maid head for the enemy camp.
And here is where she starts
spinning her lies. She tells the guards she has fled the Israelites because
she knows Holofernes is going to slaughter them. She says her God told her to
come to Holofernes and reveal the secret route into the city, as a punishment
against Israel for all their latest sins.
It helps that Judith is beautiful.
The guards are totally smitten. They know their commander will be most pleased
to have this woman brought to him. So they take Judith to Holofernes, and he
looks her over and thinks every thought a man might think when a gorgeous,
sexy, great-smelling woman shows up at your tent one day to hand you the keys
to her city.
Judith tells Holofernes he will
surely prevail against her people, but that she must go out to prayers every
night so that God can reveal to her the perfect time to attack. Sounds good to
Holofernes. For the next three nights Judith and her maidservant tromp out to
the field at midnight, carrying the food bag so they can eat right after
prayers. The guards get used to the routine, and no one bothers Judith. She
returns every morning and sits around charming Holofernes for the rest of the
day.
Finally on the fourth day,
Holofernes can’t stand it anymore. He invites her to dinner—alone. No
maidservant for her, no guards for him. Judith accepts.
Holofernes offers her wine. She
accepts. Only Judith takes just a few sips, whereas Holofernes drains wineskin
after wineskin, he’s so psyched about the whole seduction. Before he can make
his move, though, Holofernes passes out. Just as Judith planned.
She grabs his sword, and with two
mighty swipes, chops off his head.
Then she calls in her maid. “Empty
the food bag. Quickly!” They hide the head in there.
And then, just like they have for
the past three nights, they calmly walk past the guards, out into the field to
pray, carrying their food bag with them.
Only this time they keep going.
It’s still dark outside when Judith
and her maid arrive back at their city with a bloody souvenir.
Judith tells the Israelites to
mount Holofernes’s head on a post, and then attack at daybreak. They do, and
just as Judith predicted, as soon as the soldiers go to alert their commander
and find him missing his head, the whole enemy army freaks. They scatter to
the winds. The battle is over before it begins.
The story ends with Judith
receiving many marriage proposals over the years, and refusing them all. She
takes off all her fancy clothes, returns to her widow’s wardrobe, and lives out
the rest of her days in quiet seclusion.
Rock on.
I thought about that while Posie
told her mother and me everything that had happened. How sometimes it’s the
beautiful, feminine, wily women who win out over brutes like Holofernes.
Posie, thank God, is smart. Posie’s
brain keeps working even when some of ours might stop. She understands the
value of keeping your head, and not giving in to hysteria.
She had already tried screaming for
him to stop. She had slapped him, scratched him, begged him—Brett wasn’t
taking no for an answer. He had waited long enough.
He’s stronger than she is, and he
had her pinned. So what did Posie do? She thought about his hands. Both of
them were on her wrists. He had gotten her pants down, but his pants were
still on. To undo them, he would have to use one of his hands.
So Posie told herself to breathe.
Don’t panic, don’t panic. And she waited for her moment.
As soon as Brett reached for his
zipper, Posie struck.
A knee straight up to his groin and
at the same time a hard palm straight up into his nose.
Brett howled. Blood gushed. Posie
kicked and scratched and kept kicking and scratching until he was off her and
she could jump out of the car.
Then she ran. She hid behind some
bushes. She waited. Brett drove around, shouting for her, but Posie didn’t
budge. When he finally left, she walked home.
Mrs. Sherbern made Posie report it
to the police. They came over and took a statement, and said they’d look into
it. I can only imagine what they thought when they showed up at Brett’s later
that day and saw what Posie had done to his face. It was a few more days
before Brett came to school and showed the rest of us.
He looked like he’d been in a car
wreck and had flown through the windshield. The bruises on his face were
yellowing, and the scratches had just started to scab. He looked like he’d
been attacked by a cheese grater. And then there were the two black eyes and
the bandage across his nose. Posie had managed to break it.
I have hardly been more proud.
The rumors flew, of course. About
how Posie was a you-know-what tease, and when Brett fell for it Posie freaked
out and attacked him. About how Posie had mental problems and was paranoid and
thought every guy was trying to rape her. About how these police charges were
a crock, and Brett’s parents would have it sorted out in no time, and then they’d
be suing Posie for defamation.
Posie held her head high, because
that’s her way, but it looked like people actually believed Brett’s lies.
At first, anyway.
But then, like the buds coming back
to the trees after winter, things started to change. Slowly, at first, but
then picking up speed.
Graffiti on Brett’s locker: “Date
rapist” with the word “date” crossed out.
The words “Nice try” spray-painted
on his parents’ garage one night.
Printouts taped to the mirrors in
every school bathroom: “How come muggers never accuse their victims of teasing
them with their purses?” and posters with Brett’s picture from last year’s
yearbook with the words, “Wanted—but not as much as he thinks” underneath.
I swear Posie and I had nothing to do
with any of it.
But I had my suspicions who did.
I pulled him aside next time I saw
him in the hall.
“Is it you?”
Jason smiled that sly half-smile. “Me
what?”
“It is.”
Jason shrugged.
I punched him in the arm. “I like
you.”
Jason kissed my cheek and moved on.
I more than liked him. Damn it.
And then—I can’t prove it, but I
really think this is true—Jason got his harem of exes into the act. Pretty
soon the administration was getting calls every day from a lot of girls’
parents, complaining about the date rapist in our midst, and the fact that the
school wasn’t doing anything about it.
People are sheep. Or maybe they’re
sharks smelling blood in the water. Because it didn’t take long for the school
to get nervous, and to put Brett on temporary suspension while they “investigated”
(their way of saying, “Let’s get him out of here until things cool down”). He
lost his sports eligibility for the year, poor baby, and along with the black
mark on his record, he suddenly wasn’t quite the golden boy prospect for
colleges that he’d been a little while ago.
And meanwhile the county attorney
had decided to prosecute. They set a trial for mid-July.
It still wasn’t enough for Posie,
though. Can’t say I blame her.
“I want to sue him,” she told
Angela Peligro. “For assault. Attempted rape. Brutality.”
Angela puffed away and considered
it. “It’s iffy,” she said. “Believe me, I’d love to snip off that boy’s cock
and hand it to him, but the truth is he didn’t actually do anything—thanks to
you. I could sue him, but if he doesn’t have a history of this, the jury
probably won’t do much with it. We can hire private detectives, dig up what we
can—”
“That’s not fair. So what if I was
the first one? What if he had actually raped me?”
“If he had raped you,” Angela said,
“I would have sued his parents for everything I could get and then I’d take a
third of it and hand you the rest and you’d still be a girl who was raped,
right? The truth is, Posie, you fought hard and you protected yourself and
that’s something you should be proud of—no, not just proud, happy. Do you know
how many girls and boys I see who wish they could have fought back?”
“But it’s not fair!” Posie railed.
“He’s getting away with it! I want to make him pay!”
Angela smiled and said with equal
fervor, “Honey, from everything I’ve heard, you already have.”
Tribulation
[1]
April. Posie had managed to
distract me for a while with her troubles, but now it was back to my own.
It was a day I had pretended wouldn’t
come. It’s like throwing an anvil into the air and convincing yourself it won’t
fall back to earth and land on top of you. I had started this—or really, Mikey
had—no really, my father had—and now all the formalities of justice were
bringing it to a head.
Here’s what I was thinking as I sat
there, waiting for our case to be called:
It’s one thing to say it to a
counselor. Another thing to say it to your mother or even in front of your
father, but none of that was swearing on a Bible “this is the truth, the whole
truth, and etc., so help me God.” That was a whole other business.
It was like this:
I couldn’t stop shaking. Posie
pressed her thigh against mine to stop my foot from bouncing on the floor.
“Settle down,” she whispered.
“I can’t.”
“Try. Breathe deeply.”
I tried that, and only choked on
the intake. I went back to worrying a cuticle with my teeth and tapping my
heel on the ugly brown courtroom carpet.
Toni Margress turned around to give
me a confidence-inspiring smile. I withered through a brave smile of my own.
My father turned around. He was stony, sullen, pathetic. He wanted to make
sure I knew I was ruining his life. I knew.
Judge Beacons was in his fifties, I’d
guess. He was nearly bald, but had a nice brown and gray beard trimmed close.
He wore a black robe, of course, because that was his costume and this was just
a play (I told myself over and over) and I was the innocent young thing wearing
this brown shapeless dress I had stolen (borrowed) from the Drama wardrobe, and
this was my dashing friend Posie in her cherry blouse and smart black skirt,
and my mother wore a modest navy dress while her lawyer wore a black linen suit
with a crisp white blouse, and there was the villain in his expensive suit and
a tie—oh, my God, a tie I had given him one Father’s Day, I remembered that
distinctly—and Samuel Greaves wore tan slacks and a light blue shirt with a
blue plaid bow tie and a navy sports coat and we were all in our places waiting
for Act I to begin, and wouldn’t this be fun?
The courtroom scenes in
Measure
for Measure
and
The Merchant of Venice
show what a great mystery
writer Shakespeare would have been. He holds back his cards until the very
end, and whether or not you believe the characters would have behaved as they
did, you enjoy the spectacle of it, and you appreciate being surprised by
someone so masterful at manipulating his audience.
I can’t do that, I’m afraid. I don’t
have the skill or the patience for it. I was thinking about that as I sat
there, wishing so desperately that I could skip over this part and land on the
other side and look back where I had been and say, “Whew! That’s over! Who
would have thought it would turn out so well?”
There’s a famous courtroom scene in
the Old Testament, where two women come to King Solomon with the case of the
dead baby. Both women had infants who were about the same age, and during the
night one woman rolled over and accidentally suffocated her own baby. While
the other woman slept, the first woman switched babies and claimed the live one
was her own.
King Solomon declares that the live
baby should be cut in half to share between the women. The true mother—and
this is King Solomon’s trick—says, “Oh no! Please! She can have the baby.”
Solomon knows only the true mother would say that.
There were no mysteries like that in
my case. One father, one mother, one daughter with no one fighting over her.
“Elizabeth Aimes?”
I heard my name echoing through the
tunnel I had built around my head. The sound took so long to reach me that by
the time it did Posie had already elbowed me twice.
Everyone was looking at me. Toni
Margress motioned for me to come up front. I rose onto watery legs.
“Be brave,” Posie whispered.
I walked down the aisle, pushed
through the little wooden gate that separated the audience from the actors,
slunk past my father and his lawyer, slipped into the witness chair and couldn’t
look at anyone as the bailiff bade me to raise my right hand and swear.
“So help me God.” Shouldn’t it
have been, “So help me, God”?
It was too late to turn back now.
I would continue to lie and hope for God’s blessing later.
[2]
Okay, so what did I really have? I
mean, really?
There was that time when my father
came up to me while I was washing dishes at the sink, and he stroked my back
all the way down to the crest of my butt. What did he mean by that? Did I
remind him of my mother at that age? Did he wish he could have slept with her
back then, when she was still a teenager?
Other than that and the time in my
room when he was in that frenzy and ran his hands all over my face and body,
did he really ever touch me? Did I ever feel threatened by him? Grossed out,
yes. Creeped out, yeah. But did I or do I honestly believe that my father
would have parted my legs when I was a little girl and stuck himself into me
and raped me?
But what did his letter mean if it
were not a confession of that?
And then there’s the evidence the
sperm, and that cannot be ignored. You can brush it aside like he did—a lab
mix-up, some mistake—but I don’t believe in mistakes like that. And the doctor
did have the lab check twice. What I believe is that my father had certain
tendencies, and that he might have done a fair job at restraining them for most
of his life, but he couldn’t eliminate them or stifle them forever.
Do I believe he raped Mikey? You
don’t know how hard I don’t want to believe that. I want my brother to be clean
and pure all of his life, and even when he’s married and has children I don’t
want to have to think about him having sex. He’s a doll, my baby, this perfect
bundle of innocence, and I will kill the man who tries to take that away.
I surprise myself when I hear
myself say that, because I don’t think I’m a violent person. But there’s
something about true purity that makes me want to stand up on my hind legs and
defend it to my death if necessary. I feel if I saw someone hurt my little
brother I would attack without mercy and claw at him with my fingernails and
bite down to the muscle, then the bone, and I would not stop until blood was
everywhere and the pervert’s pulse was completely gone.
It makes me nauseous to think these
thoughts, to feel just how much I am capable of. I don’t think I would do as
much to save myself, but I would do it to save someone innocent like Mikey.
“Can you tell us some of the things
your father has done?” Toni Margress asked me.
I trained my eyes on her face, just
like she told me to. “He used to come to my room sometimes, after my brother
was asleep—”
A low moan hummed toward me from my
father’s table.
I kept my eyes on my mother’s
lawyer. “—and he would—you know . . .”
Toni Margress waited to let me
finish, and when she saw I was having trouble, prompted, “No, we don’t know—you’ll
have to tell us.” She gestured toward the judge, and I turned to him to get my
eyes further away from my father.
“He touched me.”
“Touched you how?” the judge asked.
“On my breasts.”
The moan.
“What did he do?” the judge asked.
“He fondled them—you know.” I
flushed blood red and swallowed hard. “Then he stuck his tongue into my mouth
and—”
No one could fail to hear my father’s
increased moaning and the low, “No, no . . .” I didn’t want to look over
there, but I did. My father stared right at me, anger and anguish on his face.
The judge cautioned Samuel Greaves
to keep his client quiet.
“Yes, Your Honor.” Samuel Greaves
whispered to my father. My father shook his head and wouldn’t take his eyes
off me.
I turned to the judge again. He
urged me to go on.
“Then he . . .” This was the part
I had thought about saying—had even practiced out loud by whispering in front
of a mirror—but it felt like glass I was trying to force out of my throat.
I couldn’t look at anyone. I hated
to lie, no matter what better purpose it served. It wasn’t my nature. I knew
I had to do it, but it tore at me, at some part that was still untouched but
now never would be again.
“Then he raped me.”
A roar erupted from my father. “Thou
shalt not bear false witness!” He tried to stand but Mr. Greaves held him
down.
“I’ll have him removed from the
court,” the judge warned Greaves.
“Sit down and shut up,” I heard
Greaves hiss at my father, who glared at him hatefully for speaking so
plainly. “I’m sorry, Your Honor. Won’t happen again.” Greaves kept his hand
firmly on my father’s shoulder. I looked at the shoulder rather than the face
just above.
“He had intercourse with you?” the
judge asked me.
I nodded.
“You have to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ for
the record,” the judge informed me.
I said, “Yes. Intercourse.”
My father slumped forward and
pounded his fist on the table.
“Lizzie,” Toni Margress said, “before
that night, were you a virgin?”
“I’m not sure,” I answered quietly.
“You’re not sure?” Toni Margress
repeated. “Why is that?”
“I think he also had . . .
intercourse with me when I was five. The doctor found sperm in me.”
My father wailed and rubbed his
forehead back and forth on his folded arm. The judge signaled his bailiff, who
quickly strode to the table and lifted my father by the elbow.
“You’ll have to wait outside,” the
judge said.
“She’s lying!”
“That will be all.” The judge
flicked his hand dismissively and turned back to me and pretended to ignore the
man shouting that I was a liar.
But I could not ignore him. His
face enthralled me. I watched his mouth as it formed the words, “Stop! Please
stop!” and “God knows you’re lying!” and “Lizzie, why are you doing this to me?”
And then the double doors swung closed and the courtroom was unnaturally
quiet. I breathed out a breath I didn’t know I had been holding. I wanted to
cry and be led out myself. I hated every inch of me, from the lying eyes to
the lying mouth to the feet that had carried me up to the witness stand to do
what I had to do.
I spoke rapidly now to get it over
with. “He had sex with me six times last summer. He always pulled out so I
wouldn’t get pregnant.” This was a detail I was proud of thinking up. “I
always begged him to stop, but he wouldn’t. He said if my mother wasn’t there
to do it—”
And here I glanced at my mother and
hated myself for what I saw. Her hand covered her mouth and her eyes were
tear-filled slits. She sobbed as quietly as she could. I had forgotten that
she was hearing most of these details for the first time. I had forgotten that
they might hurt her—horrify her—and this last bit of dramatic license about me
filling in for her was simply more than she could stand. She let out a heave
like someone had punched her in the stomach, then she laid her face on her arms
and sobbed away.
Posie was crying too, and so I
figured I might as well, too. I covered my face with my hands and said, “This
is too hard!”
The judge misunderstood me. “That’s
all right, you go ahead and take your time. Leonard,” he said to his bailiff, “some
water please, and some tissues.”
I ignored the cup of water—how
could I swallow past the shard of glass in my throat?—and worked through four
cheap, stiff tissues before I could look at the judge again.
“Do I have to say any more?” I
pleaded.
“No, but Mr. Greaves may have some
questions.”
“I do,” said the pompous ass as he
stood, and I’m sorry, but I have no respect for the man. What if I really had
been raped by his client? Would he have asked these same questions?
“You say he came to you . . .” He
pretended to refer to his notes. “Six times. Is that right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Only six times?”
“No, we only had intercourse six times.
He came to me almost every night.”
“Oh, so he came to you—where was
that? In your bedroom?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Were you alone in the house?”
“No, my little brother was there.”
“That’s Michael?”
“Yes.”
“And where does he sleep?”
“In the room down the hall. My
father’s bedroom is across from mine.”
“What time of night would this be?”
Greaves asked.
“I don’t know, late, after Mikey
went to sleep.”
“All right, so your father would
come to your—did you have a lock on your door?”
“No,” I said, happy for a question
I could answer truthfully, “he wouldn’t let me have one.”
“So he just walked into your room
and then what?”
“He’d start touching me.”
“Yes, all right. And where was
that exactly?”
“I told you. On my breasts.”
“Anywhere else?”
“All over.”
“All . . . over,” he repeated,
distracted by his notes.
I waited nervously while he flipped
through pages on his legal pad. I glanced at Posie, who had nothing to offer
but a sympathetic half-smile. My mother had composed herself and sat riveted
to Mr. Greaves’s slow, ponderous search for just the right zinger to flesh out
the liar my father said I was.
“So you say you were a virgin?
Maybe?”
“I would be if not for him,” I
answered smartly.
“Yes, yes, I see,” Samuel Greaves
mumbled, pinching his cheek thoughtfully. “So you’re probably not on birth
control of any kind.”
“No.”
“No reason to be, right?”
“Right,” I agreed.
“In fact,” he continued, glancing
at his notes, “you told Dr. Henrietta Parse, the court’s custody evaluator,
that you have never used birth control, correct?”