Lucky by Alice Sebold
Later, I didn't want to talk about it; I was putting the rape and the trial behind me.
Lila and I wrote back and forth to each other all summer. She was dieting too. Our letters to one another read like journal entries, long, pondering pieces written to have company during the writing as much as to really share any information bulletins about ourselves. We were hot and bored, nineteen and stuck at home with our parents. We told each other our life stories in those rambling letters. How we felt about everything from our individual family members to boys we knew at school. I don't remember writing her about the trial in detail. If I did, her letters don't reflect it. I got one postcard in the early summer congratulating me. That's it. It disappeared from our landscape after that.
As it did from almost everyone's. The trial seemed to have provided a very solid and heavy back door to the whole thing. Anyone who had actually entered that house with me, looked or walked into the rooms there, was very happy to finally leave the place. The door was shut. I remember agreeing with my mother that I had gone through a death-and-rebirth phenomenon in the span of one year. Rape to trial. Now the land was new and I could make of it anything I wished.
Lila, Sue, and I planned, via our letters, for the coming year. Lila was bringing a kitten down from a litter at home. I had made a pact with my mother: If I jumped up and down enough on a couch that she hated, we might convince my father when he returned from Spain that I should take it to school. I rented a truck with Sue, who lived nearby. My mother was cheery and sent me off with new clothes that fit my new figure. This was going to be the turnaround year. I was going to do what I called "live normal" now.
That fall, Mary Alice was in London in an exchange program. So were other friends. Tess was on leave. I missed them only vaguely. Lila was my living, breathing soul mate. We went everywhere together and cooked up crazy schemes. We both wanted boyfriends. I played the role of the experienced one to Lila's innocent. Over the summer I had made us matching skirts. We wore these and anything black whenever we went out.
Ken Childs was at a loss without Casey, who was also in London, and we began to pal around. I thought he was cute and, the most important fact, he already knew about me. The three of us went dancing together at on-campus clubs and art-student parties. I wanted to be a lawyer now. People liked hearing this ambition so I said it a lot. Because of Tess, I wanted to go to Ireland; I told people that too. I went to poetry and fiction readings and indulged in the wine and cheese. I took an independent study in poetry with Hayden Carruth and an independent with Raymond Carver, whom I've always thought Tess had assigned to baby-sit me.
One day I ran into Maria Flores on the street. I had written her a triumphant letter early in the summer about the trial. I told her that I had felt her there with me in the courtroom and that I hoped she could take some solace in this. Her letter back was, to be honest, too real for me. "I have a brace on my leg. My ankle is healed and I walk with a cane due to nerve damage. My suicidal tendencies have lessened though frankly, they aren't all gone." She worried about her cane inhibiting her from meeting new people and felt ashamed that she had not completed her job as a resident advisor. She ended the letter with a quote from Kahlil Gibran:
"We are all prisoners but some of us are in cells with windows and some without."
I couldn't see it for years but if one of us had a window, it was Maria who was looking out.
"I got off scot-free," I remember saying to Lila. "She'll wear the rape eternally."
I was dancing and falling in love. This time, a boy in Lila's math class: Steve Sherman. I told him about the rape after we had gone to see a movie and had a few drinks. I remember that he was wonderful with it, that he was shocked and horrified but comforting. He knew what to say. Told me I was beautiful, walked me home and kissed me on the cheek. I think he also liked taking care of me. By that Christmas, he became a fixture at our house.
At home my mother was on an upswing too. She was trying new drugs, Elavil and Xanax, and even biorhythm therapies, things she had never considered before. Group therapy was on the horizon. My mother trusting someone other than herself. "You inspire me, kiddo!" she wrote. "If you can go through what you did and go back out, I figure this old gal can too."
I had reached some positive ground zero; the world was new and open to me.
I worked on the literary magazine, The Review, and was chosen to be editor when I became a senior. The English department asked me to represent them in the Glascock Poetry Competition, which was held annually at Mount Holyoke College.
Years before, my mother had fled Mount Holyoke, leaving behind a fellowship for graduate school. She recalls that it felt like a death sentence to her. All her friends were getting married and she, the egghead, was going off to a place full of "nuns and lesbians."
So I went back to reclaim something for my mother and to take the stage for rape. I didn't win. I came in second. I read "Conviction." Reading it aloud had made me shake with it, the truth of my hate. One of the judges, Diane Wakoski, took me aside and told me that subjects like rape had a place in poetry but that I would never win the prizes or cultivate an audience at large that way.
Lila and I thrilled at stupid movies and we saw one the day I got back from Massachusetts, Sylvester Stallone in First Blood. It played at the fifty-cent movie theater near our house. We laughed hysterically at the cartoonish action on the screen in front of us, guffawing so hard we were crying and could barely see or breathe. We would have been kicked out if anyone else had been in the theater to complain but we were alone in the old run-down movie house.
"Me Rambo, you Jane," Lila said, and beat her chest.
"Me good muscle, you girl muscle."
"Grrr."
"Tee-hee."
Near the end of the film someone cleared his throat quite audibly. Lila and I froze but kept staring at the screen. "I thought we were alone," she whispered.
"So did I," I said.
We kept it down and attempted a respectful silence during the final raging shoot-out scenes. We did this by digging our nails into each other's arms and biting our lips. We giggled but we did not erupt fully.
When it was over, and the lights went up, we were alone again. We started letting out what we had held back until we turned the corner and saw the manager of the theater standing there.
"You think Vietnam is funny?"
He was an imposing man; muscle gone to fat and with a pencil mustache that slid across his upper lip, like Madison's first attorney.
"No," we both said.
He blocked our way to the exit.
"Certainly sounded like you were laughing to me," he said.
"It's pretty exaggerated," I said, expecting him to see my point.
"I was in 'Nam," he said. "Were you?"
Lila was scared and holding on to my hand.
I said, "No, sir, and I respect the veterans that fought. We didn't mean to offend. We were laughing because we found the level of machismo exaggerated."
He stared at me as if I had blocked him with reason when what I had really blocked him with were words found inside me when under threat: a skill I now had.
He let us pass but warned us he did not want to see us again in his theater.
We didn't even try to get our giddy mood back. I was furious as we walked down the hill toward home. "It sucks being a woman," I said, stating the obvious. "You always get smashed!"
Lila wasn't ready to go there yet. She was busy trying to see his point. In my mind I was doing now what I did more and more of: fighting a man hand to hand and no matter how I played it, losing every time.
There were good men and bad, thinking men and muscle. I made that separation in my mind. I began to categorize them this way. Steve, who had a sort of ropy runner's body, was gentle in his movements and cared most about his studies. He would sit for hours until he had memorized--verbatim--the chapters of his textbooks. His Ukrainian-immigrant parents were paying cash for his education as they had for their cars and
I began a sort of unconscious lying to myself when engaged in sex. Steve's pleasure was all I focused on, the point of the journey, so if there were bumps and memories, painful flashes of the night in the tunnel, I rode over them, numbed. Happy when Steve was happy, I was always ready to pop right out of bed and go on a walk or read my latest poem. If I could get back to the brain in time, like oxygen, the sex didn't hurt as much.
And there was the color of his skin. I could focus on a patch of white flesh and begin. As Steve was being gentle and ardent, inside I was talking myself down the path again. "This is not Thorden Park, he is your friend, Gregory Madison is in Attica, you are fine." It often worked to get me through it, like gritting your teeth on a frightening carnival ride that those around you appear to enjoy. If you can't do, mimic. Your brain is still alive.
By late in the year I had established myself as a sort of chubby New Age diva. The art students knew who I was and so did the poets. I threw a party with the confidence it would be packed and it was. Steve bought me white vinyl dance versions of my favorite songs and made dance tapes from them.
Mary Alice and Casey were back from London and showed up. The whole apartment house throbbed, but this time it was with my music and my friends. I had gotten A's in Carruth's and Carver's independents and was now taking a class with a poet named Jack Gilbert. I couldn't believe my luck. Even Gilbert showed up! In the kitchen a trash can full of rotgut punch had more and more ingredients added as the party-goers got drunk. Lila's spices were being pitched in wholesale and small things, like forks and houseplants, joined the nutmeg and arrowroot.
Suddenly people we didn't know began to show up--boys. They were loud and strong and went for the pretty girls like magnets. This meant Mary Alice, who, by that time, was very drunk. The dancing on the dance floor got sexual. Steve almost had a fight with a stranger who was moving in on one of his female friends. The music got louder, a speaker blew, the booze ran out. All of this resulted in the sanest and soberest, who had not left already, peeling out. I stood like a barking Scottie by Mary Alice. When boys came toward her I steered them off. I threatened them with what they respected: a man. Mary Alice's boyfriend, I lied, was the captain of the basketball team and due soon with his teammates. If they doubted me I got up in their faces and did my straight-shooting act. I had listened to the detectives and how they talked, knew how to sound streetwise.
Mary Alice decided to leave and Steve and I found her a person we trusted to take her home. Near the door, as we were saying good-bye, she passed out. I and those around us stood and stared at her as she lay unconscious on the floor. I thought she was faking and at first said, "Come on, Mary Alice, get up." Her hair had been so beautiful as she fell, the long golden mane swinging up and out.
I got down on my hands and knees and tried to prod her. No luck. Steve came through the stragglers and strangers. As we stood over her in a circle, boys began to offer to take her home.
I can only think of dogs here. From barking Scottie to scrappy terrier to sudden superhuman strength. I wouldn't even let Steve carry her. I picked Mary Alice up in my arms--all 115 pounds of her--and carried her, with Lila and Steve clearing the way, back to Lila's room. We lay her out on the bed. She was a drunk coed but looked like a sleeping angel. The rest of my night was devoted to making sure she stayed that way. When cruisers showed up because of the complaints of neighbors, I watched the party break down and Steve and Lila escort the more intoxicated strangers out. Mary Alice spent the night. In the morning the place was sticky, and we discovered a friend of a friend of someone's who'd passed out and fell behind the couch.
The summer between my junior and senior years Steve and I lived in the apartment together and took summer school. Morally, my mother was able to adjust to the idea of me living with a man because, as she said, "it's nice to think you have a built-in security guard." Following summer school I got my first taste of teaching by assisting at an art camp for gifted students at Bucknell University. If I didn't become a lawyer, I decided, I would teach. I had no way of knowing then that teaching would end up being my lifeline, my way back.
By my senior year, I was a habitue of the poetry and fiction readings held on campus. I also worked as a waitress at Cosmos Pizza Shop, on Marshall Street, and my work schedule, combined with these evening readings, meant that I was out at night a lot. Lila seemed not to mind. She had the apartment to herself or shared it peaceably with our new roommate, Pat.
Lila found Pat via the anthropology department. He was younger than we were by two years and only a sophomore. Lila and I had discovered porn magazines in his room, fetish publications like Jugs, and one that featured only nude obese women. But he paid the rent and kept to himself. I was just happy that he didn't look the part of the regular bug eaters in anthropology. He was tall and slim with shoulder-length black hair. His Italian ancestry meant a lot to him, as did his love of shock. He showed Lila and me the speculum he had pilfered from a relative who was a gynecologist. He strung it to the light pull of his overhead.
The three of us had begun to adjust to one another by November of that year. After two months Lila and I were getting used to Pat's love of pranks. He liked to touch a spot on your collarbone and say, "What's that?" When you looked down, he chucked you under the chin. Or he would bring you a cup of coffee and, when you reached for it, pull it away. He teased us and when he went too far, Lila and I whined in response. Lila, who had a younger brother, told me that with Pat in the house, it was as if she had never left home.
In a course called Ecstatic Religion, I sat next to a boy named Marc. Like Jamie, he was tall and blond, and in small ways didn't fit in. He didn't go to Syracuse. He was getting a degree in landscape architecture from SUNY's forestry school, which, like a dependent little sister, shared buildings and grounds with Syracuse. He had also come of age in New York's Chelsea district. This made him wise beyond his twenty-one years, and sophisticated, or so it seemed to me. He had friends with lofts in Soho. Places, he promised, that he would show me someday.
After religion class we had chaste but passionate sessions about that day's topics. The history of shamans and the occult garnered our intense intellectual scrutiny. He gave me tapes of Philip Glass and knew things about music and art that I didn't. He spoke wryly on subjects like Jacqueline Susann's adoration of Ethel Merman. He represented what my mother had always said was the best of New York--culture by birthright--even if the love trysts of "the Merm" and the author of Valley of the Dolls weren't what she meant.
Suddenly, Steve's earnestness, his caring attention to my pains and ills, didn't seem as attractive as Marc's "seen it all, done it all" world. When I told my jokes: "Why doesn't a rape trial rate a mention on ye ol' resume?" Marc would laugh and join the riff whereas Steve would stop me, place a hand on my shoulder, and say, "You know that's not really funny, right?" Marc had a car, cable television, other girls thought he was cute. He wasn't afraid of drinking and he smoked cigarettes like a chimney. He cursed and because he was going to school for architecture, he drew.
He had also been honest and up front with me from the beginning. When we'd met, the year before at a party, we were clearly attracted to each other. He told me later that three boys had pulled him into the bathroom after they saw him talking to me.
"FYI, Marc. That girl's been raped."
Marc had said, "So?"
And they had looked at him dismayed. "Do we have to spell it out for you?"
But Marc was a natural feminist. His mother had been unceremoniously dumped for a much younger woman. One of his sisters was a lesbian and called her two male cats "the girls," the other was a lawyer with the Manhattan district attorney's office. He had read more Virginia Woolf than I had and he introduced me to the work of Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin. He was a revelation to me.
I was to him as well. He knew names and theories I had never heard, but when he met me, I was the only woman he knew who had
I began having fun with Marc while I struggled with Steve.
"How many security guards does one girl need?" Lila asked one day after I'd been on the phone twice to each.
I didn't have an answer save to say I had never been popular with boys and suddenly I felt I was: Two boys both wanted me.
Our old roommate Sue had done a photo-essay for her senior project and she had left all sorts of makeup behind. One night, when Pat was at the library, I decided to play fashion photog and snap pictures of Lila. I dressed her up. I made her take off her glasses and we painted heavy kohl lines across her eyes. I really laid it on. Deep blues and blacks surrounded her eyes. Her lips were a horrible dark red. I posed her in the hallway of the apartment and began to point and shoot. We were having a wonderful time, just the two of us. I had her lie on the floor and glance up, or bring her shirt down over her shoulder for what we called "a skin shot." I mimicked what I thought real fashion photographers said to get models in the mood. "It's hot, you're in the Sahara, a beautiful man is bringing you a pina colada," or, "Somewhere, the only true love of your life is freezing to death in Antarctica. He has one precious photo of you to keep him alive and this is it. I want sex, sincerity, searing intelligence." When she wasn't distorting her features to achieve "the look," she was cracking up. I posed her in front of the full-length mirror on the outside of the bathroom door and took a long shot with me in it. I had her sit with her head in profile and her hands in black gloves.
My favorites back then were by far the more dramatic. In them, she is crawling on her hands and knees, blind eyes wide and lined with color, down the hall outside my bedroom. I think of them now as Lila's "before" shots.
THIRTEEN
A week before Thanksgiving 1983, the poet Robert Bly gave a reading in the auditorium of the Hall of Languages. I was anxious to see him, having greedily read his poems at the urging of both Tess and Hayden Carruth. Lila was at home studying for the kind of killer test that, as a poetry major, I no longer had to concern myself with. Pat had gone to study in Bird Library.