Lucky by Alice Sebold
In class, Tess Gallagher was keeping my pencil busy. I wrote down in my notebook that I should be writing "poems that mean." That to tackle the hardest things, to be ambitious, was what Gallagher expected of us. She was tough. We were to memorize and recite, because she had had to as a student, a poem a week. She made us read and understand forms, scan lines, had us write a villanelle and a sestina. By shaking us up, using a rigorous approach, she hoped to both encourage us to write poems that meant, and to dispel any belief that feigning despond was what created good poetry. It got so you knew, very quickly, what would get Gallagher riled. When Raphael, who had a pointed goatee and a waxed mustache, said he hadn't a poem to turn in because he was happy and he could only write when he was depressed, Gallagher's Cupid's-bow lips pursed, her preternaturally raised eyebrows raised farther, and she said, "Poetry is not an attitude. It is hard work."
I had not written anything about the rape except journal entries in the form of running letters to myself. I decided to write a poem.
It was awful. As I recall it now, it ran five pages and rape was only a muddled metaphor that I tried to contain inside a wordy albatross that purported to be about society and violence and the difference between television and reality. I knew it wasn't my best but I thought it showed me to be smart, to be able to write poems that meant but also had format (I divided it into four sections using Roman numerals!).
Gallagher was kind. I hadn't turned the poem in to be workshopped, so we met in her office for a conference. Her office, like Tobias Wolff's across the hall, was small and crowded with books and reference materials, but whereas Wolff's looked like he hadn't quite settled in, Gallagher's seemed like she had been there for years. Her office was warm. She had tea in a mug on her desk. A colorful Chinese silk shawl was draped across the back of her chair, and that day her long, wavy hair was held back by sequined combs.
"Let's talk about this poem you've given me, Alice," she said.
And somehow I ended up telling her my story. And she listened. She was not bowled over, not shocked, not even scared of the burden this might make me as her student. She was not motherly or nurturing, though she was both those things in time. She was matter-of-fact, her head nodding in acknowledgment. She listened for the pain in my words, not to the narrative itself. She was intuiting what it meant to me, what was most important, what, in that confused mass of experience and yearning she heard in my voice, she could single out to give back.
"Have they caught this guy?" she asked after listening to me for some time.
"No."
"I have an idea, Alice," she said. "How about you start a poem with this line." And she wrote it down. If they caught you ...
If they caught you,
long enough for me
to see that face again,
maybe I would know
your name.
I could stop calling you 'the rapist,'
and start calling you John or Luke or Paul.
I want to make my hatred large and whole.
If they found you, I could take
those solid red balls and slice them
separately off, as everyone watched.
I have already planned what I would do
for a pleasurable kill, a slow, soft, ending.
First,
I would kick hard and straight with a boot,
into you, stare while you shot quick and loose,
contents a bloody pink hue.
Next,
I would slice out your tongue,
You couldn't curse, or scream.
Only a face of pain would speak
for you, your thick ignorance through.
Thirdly,
Should I hack away those sweet
cow eyes with the glass blades you made
me lie down on? Or should I shoot, with a gun,
close into the knee; where they say
the cap shatters immediately?
I picture you now,
your fingers rubbing sleep from
those live blind eyes, while I rise restlessly.
I need the blood of your hide
on my hands. I want to kill you
with boots and guns and glass.
I want to fuck you with knives.
Come to me, Come to me,
Come die and lie, beside me.
When I finished this poem I was shaking. I was in my room at Haven Hall. Despite its wobbles as a poem, its heavily Plath-influenced rhymes, or what Gallagher later called "overkill" in many places, it was the first time I'd addressed the rapist directly. I was speaking to him.
Gallagher loved it. "Now that's the ticket," she said to me. I had written an important poem, she told me, and she wanted it to be workshopped. This was a big step. This meant sitting in a room with fourteen strangers--one of them, as it happened, Al Tripodi--and basically telling them I had been raped. Buoyed by Gallagher, but still afraid, I agreed to do it. I worried over a title. Finally, I made up my mind: "Conviction."
I passed the poem out and then, as was standard practice, I read it aloud to my fellow students. I was, as I read it, hot. My skin blushed and I could feel the blood rush to my face, prickle along the tops of my ears and the ends of my fingers. I could feel the class around me. They were riveted. They were staring at me.
When I was done, Gallagher had me read it again. Before she did this, she told the class that she expected everyone to comment. I read it again, and this time it felt like torture, an instant replay of something that had been hard enough the first time. I still question why Gallagher was so insistent that I workshop "Conviction" and that each and every student--this was not standard--respond to it afterward. It was an important poem by her standards, in that it dealt with important material. Perhaps, by her actions, she meant to emphasize this not only to the class, but to me as well.
But the eyes of most of my peers had a hard time meeting mine.
"Who wants to start?" Gallagher asked. She was direct. By her example she was telling the class: This is what we do here.
Most of the students were shy. They buried their response in words like brave, or important, or bold. One or two were angry that they had to respond, felt the poem, combined with Gallagher's admonition that they react, was an act of aggression on her part and mine.
Al Tripodi said, "You don't really feel that way, do you?"
He was looking right at me. I thought of my father. Suddenly, there was no one else in the room.
"Like what?"
"You don't want to shoot him in the knees and that other stuff with the knives. You can't feel that way."
"Yes, I do," I said. "I want to kill him."
The room was still. Only Maria Flores, a quiet latino girl, had yet to speak. When Gallagher told her it was her turn, she passed. Gallagher pressed. Maria said she could not speak. Gallagher said she could formulate her thoughts during the break and then speak. "Everyone must comment," she said. "What Alice has given you is a gift. I think it's important that everyone recognize this and respond to her. You are joining her at the table by speaking."
We took a break. Al Tripodi quizzed me further out in the flagstone hall near the display case where faculty publications and awards sat on dusty glass shelves. I stared down at the dead bugs that had gotten stuck inside.
He could not understand how I could write those words.
"I hate him," I said.
"You're a beautiful girl."
Presented with this for the first time, I was unable to recognize something I would come up against time and time again. You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful. Like any girl, I wanted to be beautiful. But I was filled with hate. So how could I be both for Al Tripodi?
I told him about a dream I had over and over again those days. A daydream. Somehow, I wasn't sure how, I could get at the rapist and do anything to him that I wanted. I would do those things in my poem, I told Tripodi, and I would do worse.
"What is there to gain by that?" he asked me.
"I guess I don't. I feel sorry for you."
I scrutinized the dead bugs on their backs, how their legs went out and then shot back in at sharp angles, how their antennae fell in stilled fragile arcs like lost human eyelashes. Tripodi could not see it because I didn't move a muscle, but my body was a wall of flames. I would not take pity, anybody's.
Maria Flores did not come back to class. I was infuriated. They just couldn't deal, I thought, and this made me angry. I knew I was not beautiful and in Gallagher's presence, for three hours that day, I didn't have to care about being beautiful. She, by writing that first line down, by workshopping the piece, had given me my permission slip--I could hate.
Exactly one week later, Gallagher's if they caught you would turn out to be all too prescient. On October 5, I ran into my rapist on the street. By the end of that night, I could stop calling him "the rapist," and start calling him Gregory Madison.
I had workshop that day with Tobias Wolff.
Wolff, whom I met the same day I did Gallagher, was a harder sell. He was a man, and at the time men had to surprise me before I even so much as thought about trusting them. He was not a performer. He made it clear that his personality was not the issue--fiction was. So I, who had decided to be a poet and had lucked into this fiction thing, took a wait-and-see attitude. I was the only sophomore in Wolffs class and the only one to wear weird clothes. The fiction writers wore a lot of starch and denim, shirts emblazoned with sports teams or upright plaids. Poets flowed. They did not, most certainly, wear shirts emblazoned with the logos of sports teams. I saw myself as a poet. Tobias Wolff, with his military posture and never indirect analysis of a story, was not my bag.
Before class I needed to get something to eat. I walked down to Marshall Street from Haven. I had been in Syracuse for a month and begun to make quick trips to Marshall Street, as everyone did, for snacks and school supplies. There was a mom-and-pop store that I liked. It was run by a Palestinian man in his sixties, who often told stories and who had an emphasis, when he said "Good day," that told me he meant it.
I was walking down the street when I saw, up ahead, a black man talking to a shady-looking white guy. The white guy stood in an alleyway and talked over the top of the fence. He had long brown hair, to his shoulders, and a few days' growth of beard. He wore a white T-shirt whose sleeves were rolled up to accentuate the small bellies of his biceps. The black guy I could see only from the back, but I was hyperaware. I went through my checklist: right height, right build, something in his posture, talking to a shady guy. Cross the street!
I did. I crossed the street and walked the rest of the way to the mom-and-pop store. I did not look back. I crossed the street again to walk directly into the store. Time slowed down here. I remember things in the way one rarely does. I knew I had to go back outside and I tried to calm myself. Inside the store I chose a peach yogurt and a Teem soda--two items, if you knew me, that testified to my faltering composure. When the Palestinian man rang them up, he was brusque and hurried. There was no "Good day."
I left the store, crossed directly back to the safety of the other side of the street, and shot a quick glance over to the alleyway. Both men were gone. I also noticed a policeman to my right, on my side of the street. He was getting out of his patrol car. He was very tall, over six feet, and had bright, carrot-orange hair and a mustache. He seemed in no hurry. I assessed my surroundings and decided I was okay. It had been just a more intense version of the fear I had felt around certain black men ever since the rape. I checked my watch and quickened my step. I did not want to be late for Wolff's workshop.
Then, as if out of nowhere, I saw my rapist crossing toward me. He walked diagonally across the street from the other side. I did not stop walking. Or scream.
He was smiling as he approached. He recognized me. It was a stroll in the park to him; he had met an acquaintance on the street.
I knew him but I could not make myself speak. I needed all my energy to focus on believing I was not under his control again.
"Hey, girl," he said. "Don't I know you from somewhere?" He smirked at me, remembering.
I did not respond. I looked directly at him. Knew his face had been the face over me in the tunnel. Knew I had kissed those lips, stared into those eyes, smelled the crushed-berry smell on his skin.
I was too afraid to yell out. There was a cop behind me but I could not scream: "That's the man who raped me!" That happens in movies. I put one foot in front of the other. I heard him laughing behind me. But I was still walking.
He had no fear. It had been nearly six months since we'd seen each other last. Six months since I lay under him in a tunnel on top of a bed of broken glass. He was laughing because he had gotten away with it, because he had raped before me, and because he would rape again. My devastation was a pleasure for him. He was walking the streets, scot-free.
I turned the corner at the end of the block. Over my shoulder I saw him walking up to the redheaded policeman. He was shooting the breeze, so sure of his safety that he felt comfortable enough, right after seeing me, to tease a cop.
I never question why I went to tell Wolff I couldn't attend his class. It was my duty. I was his student. I was the only sophomore in the class.
I walked to the Hall of Languages at the top of the hill and checked my watch. I had time before Wolffs class to make two phone calls from the phone booth on the bottom floor. I called Ken Childs, told him what had happened, asked him to meet me at the library nearby in half an hour. I wanted to make a sketch of the rapist and Ken was in art school. Then, as soon as I hung up the phone, I called my parents collect.
They both got on the phone.
"Mom and Dad," I said, "I'm calling from the Hall of Languages."
My mother was attuned now to any waver in my voice.
"What is it, Alice?" she asked.
"I just saw him, Mom," I said.
"Saw who?" my father asked, as always two beats back.
"The rapist."
I don't remember their reaction. I couldn't. I was calling because I needed them to know, but, once I told them, I did not wait, I rushed at them with facts. "I'm going to tell Professor Wolff I can't come to class. I've called Ken Childs, he's meeting me to walk me home. I want to make a sketch."
"Call us when you get there," my mother said. I remember that. "Have you called the police?" my father asked.
I did not hesitate. "Not yet," I said, which meant to all of us that it was not a yes-or-no question. I would call them. I would pursue this.
I went up the stairs to where my workshop was held, and ran into Wolff as he was about to enter the English office.
The other students were filtering inside. I approached him. "Professor Wolff," I said, "can I talk to you?"
"It's class time, we'll talk after."
"I can't make it to class, that's what it's about."
I knew he would not be happy. I did not know how not happy he would be. He proceeded to tell me how lucky I was to be in the class, and that missing this one class was equivalent to missing three classes of a regular undergraduate course. All this I knew. All this had been why I walked blindly up to Humanities Hall instead of returning directly to my dorm.
I begged Wolff to give me just two minutes of his time. To talk to me in his office, not the hall. "Please," I said. Something in the way I said it called to that place inside him beyond the formal rules of the classroom, which I knew he valued. "Please," I said, and he responded--still it was a concession--with, "It will have to be brief."
I followed him down the short hall, turned the corner after him, and stood there while he unlocked the door. Looking back, I can't believe how calm I remained from the moment I saw my rapist on the street to that moment, inside Wolff's office, with the door closed. Now I was with a man I knew would not hurt me. For the first time, I thought it was safe to exhale. He sat facing me while I hovered over and then sat in the student chair.
"I can't come to class. I just saw the man who raped me. I have to call the police."
I remember his face and I remember it vividly. He was a father. I knew this vaguely at the time. He had little boys. He came near me. He wanted to comfort, but then, instinctually, he pulled back. I was a rape victim; how would I interpret his touch? His face fell into the recesses reserved for the pure confusion one expresses when there is nothing on this earth that he or she can do to make something better.
He asked if he could make a call, if I had a way home, what, if anything, he could do. I told him I had called a friend who would meet me at the library and walk me home, where I would phone the police.
Wolff walked me back out into the hall. Before he let me go--my mind already working on putting one foot in front of the other, thinking of the phone call to the police, repeating over and over again in my head maroon windbreaker, blue jeans rolled at cuffs, Converse All-Star sneakers--Wolff stopped me and put both hands on my shoulders.
He looked at me and when it was clear to him that for that second he held my attention, he spoke.
"Alice," he said, "a lot of things are going to happen and this may not make much sense to you right now, but listen. Try, if you can, to remember everything."
I have to restrain myself from capitalizing the last two words. He meant them to be capitalized. He meant them to resound and to meet me sometime in the future on whatever path I chose. He had known me for two weeks. I was nineteen. I sat in his class and drew flowers on my jeans. I had written a story about sewing dummies that came to life and sought revenge on dressmakers.
So it was a shout across a great distance. He knew, as I was later to discover when I walked into Doubleday on Fifth Avenue in New York and bought This Boy's Life, Wolffs own story, that memory could save, that it had power, that it was often the only recourse of the powerless, the oppressed, or the brutalized.
The walk to the library, only two hundred yards across the front of the quad and on the other side of the street fronting the Hall of Languages, was a walk I made on automatic. I became a machine. I think it must be the way men patrol during wartime, completely attuned to movement or threat. The quad is not the quad but a battlefield where the enemy is alive and hiding. He waits to attack the moment you let your guard down. The answer--never let it down, not even for a second.