Lucky by Alice Sebold
"Alice," said my mother, "that's not true."
"Yes, it is. You should have seen the way he looked at me. He couldn't deal."
My voice was raised. As a result, my father stirred from his academic lockdown in the study.
"What's all the commotion?" he asked, entering the family room. He held his reading glasses in his right hand and looked, as he frequently did, as if he had been rudely awakened from life in eighteenth-century Spain.
"Thanks for joining us, Bud," my mother said. "Stay out of this."
"No nice boy is ever going to want me," I said again.
My father, without any context, was horrified. "Alice, why would you say a thing like that?"
"Because it's true!" I yelled. "Because I was raped and now no one will want me."
"That's preposterous," he said. "You're a beautiful girl; of course nice boys will ask you out."
"Bullshit. Nice boys don't ask rape victims out!"
I was really blaring it now. My sister retreated from the room and I yelled up after her, "Fine, go write it in your journal. 'A nice boy came to see me today.' I'll never write that."
"Leave your sister out of this," my mother said.
"What makes her so special? She gets to stay up in her room while you put me on suicide watch. Dad is walking around like I'm going to fall apart if he touches me, and you're hiding in the laundry room to have your flaps!"
"Now, Alice," my father said, "you're just upset."
My mother began rubbing her chest.
"Your mother and I are doing the best we can," my father said. "We just don't know what to do."
"You could say the word for starters," I said, stilled now, my face hot with screaming, but tears making their way up again.
"What word?"
"Rape, Dad," I said. "Rape. The reason why people are staring at me, the reason why you don't know what to do, why those old ladies are coming over and Mom is flipped out, why Jonathan Gulick stared at me like a freak. Okay!"
"Calm down, Alice," my father was saying, "you're upsetting your mother."
It was true. My mother had edged over to the far end of the couch--away from us. She was bent over with one hand on her head and one rubbing the center of her chest. I openly resented her then. Resented how attention always focused on the weakest one.
The doorbell rang. It was Tom McAllister. A year older than I, he was the most handsome boy I knew. My mother thought he looked like the actor Tom Selleck. I had not seen Tom since the midnight service at Christmas Eve. We had been singing a hymn. At the close of the hymn, when I turned around in my pew, he smiled at me.
While my father answered the door to welcome him, I slipped down the back hall to wash my face in the downstairs bathroom. I splashed cold water on my face and tried to finger-comb my hair.
I arranged my robe so it covered the necklace of bruises from the rapist's hands. I cried so much each day my eyes were permanently swollen. I wished I looked better. Pretty, like my sister.
My mother and father had invited Tom out onto the porch. When I joined them, he stood up from the couch he'd been sitting on.
"These are for you," he said, and handed me a bouquet of flowers. "I got you a present too. My mom helped me pick it out."
He was staring at me. But under his scrutiny I felt different than I had with Jonathan Gulick.
My mother brought us sodas and then, after a brief exchange with Tom about his classes at Temple, she took the flowers inside to put them in water, and my father left the porch and went to read in the living room.
We sat down on the couch. I busied myself with opening the gift. It was a mug, with a cartoon of a cat holding a bunch of balloons--the kind of gift that, in another mood, I would have disdained. It seemed beautiful to me and my thanks to Tom were sincere. This was my nice boy.
"You look better than I thought," he said.
"Thank you."
"Reverend Breuninger made it sound like you were pretty badly beaten."
I realized that, unlike the old ladies, he saw nothing hidden in those words.
"You know, don't you?" I said.
His face was blank. "Know what?"
"What really happened to me."
"They said in church you were robbed in a park."
I watched him intently. I was unflinching.
"I was raped, Tom," I said.
He was stunned.
"You can leave if you want," I said. I stared down at the mug in my hands.
"I didn't know, nobody told me," he said. "I'm so sorry."
While he said this, and meant it, he also pulled away from me. His posture grew more erect. Without actually getting up to move away, he seemed to invite in as much air as could fit in the space between us.
"You know now," I said. "Does it change how you feel about me?"
He couldn't win. What could he say? Of course it must have affected him. I'm sure it did, but I didn't want the answer I know now, I wanted what he said.
"No, of course not. It's just, wow, I don't know what to say."
What I took away from that afternoon, besides his assurance that he would call me soon and we would see each other again, was that one word to my question: no.
Of course, I didn't really believe him. I was smart enough to know he was saying what any nice boy would. I was raised to be a good girl; I knew what to say at the right moment too. But because he was a boy my age, he became heroic in proportion to any other visitor. No old lady, not even Myra, could give me what Tom had given me, and my mother knew it. She talked Tom up all that week, and my father, who had gleefully derided a boy who had dared to ask once what country they spoke Latin in, played along. I did too, even though we all knew we were clinging to the wreckage; it was useless to pretend I hadn't changed.
There was another visit, this time a few days later and, no doubt, much harder for Tom. Again we sat on the porch. This time I listened and he spoke. He had gone home, he said, from being with me and told his mother. She hadn't seemed surprised, had even guessed as much from the way Father Breuninger spoke. That evening, or the next day, I forget the time line here, Tom's mother had called Tom and his younger sister, Sandra, into the kitchen and told them she had something to say.
Tom said she stood at the sink with her back to them. While she looked out the window, she told them the story of how she had been raped. She was eighteen when it happened. She had never told anyone about it until that day. It happened at a train station, on her way to visit her brother, who was away at school. What I remember best is how Tom said that when the two men grabbed her she had slipped out of her new coat and kept on running. They got her anyway.
I was thinking, as tears rolled down Tom's face, of how my rapist had grabbed my long hair.
"I don't know what to do or say," Tom said.
"You can't do anything," I said to him.
I wish I could go back and erase my last line to Tom. I wish I could say, "You're already doing it, Tom. You're listening." I wondered how his mother had gone on to have a husband and a family and never tell anyone.
After those visits in the early summer, Tom and I saw each other at church. By that time I was no longer fixated on gaining Tom's attention or being seen with a handsome boy. I was scrutinizing his mother. She knew I knew about her, and she certainly knew about me, but we never spoke. A distance grew between me and Tom. It would have anyway, but the story of my rape had stormed into their lives uninvited. It had catalyzed a revelation inside their home. How that revelation eventually affected them I do not know. But via her son, Mrs. McAllister gave me two things: my first awareness of another rape victim who lived in my world, and, by telling her sons, the proof that there was power to be had in sharing my story.
The urge to tell was immediate. It sprang out of a response so ingrained in me that even if I had tried to hold it back, thought better of it, I doubt I could have done so.
My family had secrets, and from an early age, I had crowned myself the one who would reveal them
Recently my mother and I had a discussion about saving face at her nearby Radio Shack.
"I'm convinced the clerk thinks I'm a lunatic," my mother said, on the subject of returning a portable phone.
"People return things all the time, Mom," I said.
"I've already returned it once."
"So, the clerk may think you're a pain in the ass but I doubt he'll think you're insane."
"I just can't go in there again. I can hear them now: 'Oh, there's that old lady who couldn't figure out a fork if it came with instructions.'"
"Mom," I said, "they exchange things all the time."
It's funny now, but growing up, the worry over the opinions of others meant keeping secrets. My grandmother, my mother's mother, had had a brother who died drunk. His body was discovered three weeks later by his younger brother. My sister and I were warned never to tell Grandma that Mom was an alcoholic. We also weren't supposed to talk about her flaps, and she did her best to hide them on our visits to Bethesda, where her parents lived. Although my parents cursed a blue streak, we were not supposed to curse. And even though we heard what they thought of the deacon at St. Peter's (a "supercilious moron"), what they thought of the neighbors ("He's courting a heart attack with all that fat"), what they thought of one sister when the other sister was up in her room--we were not meant to repeat it.
I seemed constitutionally unable to follow these instructions. When we moved to Pennsylvania from Rockville, Maryland, when I was five, my sister had to repeat the third grade. This was because she was too young, according to the East Whiteland school district, to be in fourth grade. So, on this basis alone, she had to stay in third grade for another year. This was traumatic for her because flunking a grade was one of the worst brands you could bear at age eight in a new town. My mother said no one had to know. She failed to say that for this to happen, they would have to wire my mouth shut and keep me from leaving the house.
A few days after settling into the new house, I was in the backyard with our basset hound, Feijoo. I met a neighbor, Mrs. Cochran, who bent down and introduced herself. She had a child my age, a boy, Brian, and no doubt wanted to get the scoop on our family. I obliged her.
"My mother's the one with the pits in her face," I said to our shocked neighbor. I was referring to my mother's acne scars. In response to the question, "Are there any more like you at home?" I said, "No, but there's my sister. She just flunked third grade."
And so it went. My mouth only got bigger as time wore on, but I won't take all the blame. I was acutely aware of my audience; the adults loved it.
Simply, the rules of revelation were too complicated for me to understand. My parents could say anything they wanted, but once outside our house, I was supposed to keep mum.
"The neighbors like to pump you for information," my mother would say. "You have to learn to be more reticent. I don't know why you insist on talking to everyone."
I didn't know what reticent meant. I was only following their example. If they wanted a quiet kid, I eventually told them during some screaming match in high school, maybe I should have taken up smoking. That way I would have lung cancer instead of what my mother accused me of having, which was cancer of the mouth.
Sergeant Lorenz was the first person to hear my story. But he often interrupted with the words, "That's inconsequential." He probed my story for facts that would dovetail into the more salient charges. He was what he was: a "just-the-facts-ma'am" cop.
Who could I tell these things to? I was at home. I didn't feel my sister could handle it and Mary Alice was miles away, working a job at the Jersey shore. It was not something I felt I could do over the phone lines. I tried to tell my mother.
I was privy to many things. Little asides from my mother, such as, "Your father doesn't know the meaning of affection," when I was eleven, or the discussions we had had during my grandfather's protracted illness and death. No events were hidden from me. That was a decision I think my mother made early, in direct response to her own mother. My grandmother is stoic and taciturn. In a crisis, her words of wisdom are old school: "If you don't think about it, it will go away." My mother, given her own life, knew this not to be true.
So there was a precedent for our discussion. By the time I was eighteen, she had sat me down and detailed her alcoholism, its onset and aftermath. She believed that by sharing such things I might be able to avoid them or, if need be, recognize them when they occurred. By talking about them to her children, she was also acknowledging that they were real and that they had an effect on us too, that things like this shaped a family, not just the person they happened to.
My memory says it may have been nighttime, I can't be certain, but it was a few weeks after the rape and it was at the kitchen table. If my mother and I were not alone in the house, then certainly my father was in his study and my sister in her room, so we could have heard approaching footsteps if there were any.
"I need to tell you what happened in the tunnel," I said.
Place mats were still on the table from dinner. My mother fidgeted with the corner of hers.
"You can try," she said, "but I can't promise I can do this."
I began. I told her about Ken Childs's house, about taking pictures in his apartment. I got onto the path in the park. I told her about the rapist's hands, how he grabbed me with both arms, about the fighting on the bricks. When I got into the tunnel, started taking off my clothes, when he touched me, she had to stop.
"I can't, Alice," she said. "I want to, but I can't."
"It helps me to try and talk about it, Mom," I said.
"I understand that, but I don't think I'm the one to do it with."
"I don't have anyone else," I said.
"I can make you an appointment with Dr. Graham."
Dr. Graham was my mother's psychiatrist. In reality, she was the family psychiatrist. She had begun as my sister's psychiatrist, and then wanted to see us as a family so she could see how the family dynamic affected my sister. My mother had even sent me to Dr. Graham a few times after a particularly bad spill down the spiral staircase. I was always running up or down it in sock feet and often would slip on the polished wood. Each time, I did a sort of bouncing pratfall until I reached the landing or my limbs tangled into a configuration that stopped my body just short of the flagstone floor in the front hall. My mother decided this clumsiness might be part of a desire to self-destruct. I was certain it was nothing so sophisticated. I was a klutz.
Now I had a real reason to see a psychiatrist. In the past, I prided myself on being the only member of the family who hadn't had therapy--I did not count a discussion of my pratfalls as therapy--and had tortured my sister while she was under Dr. Graham's care. Mary entered therapy the same year the Talking Heads came out with the perfect song for her little sister to use against her: "Psycho Killer." Sibling brutality with a melody. We had to scrimp to pay for her therapy. I reasoned that what my parents spent on her, they should spend on me. It wasn't my fault Mary was crazy.
Turnabout is fair play, but Mary didn't tease me that summer. I told her that Mom thought I should go to Dr. Graham and we both agreed it might be good for me. My motivation was largely aesthetic. I liked the way Dr. Graham looked. She was feminist in the flesh. She was just under six feet tall, wore large batik muumuus on her dominant, but not heavy, frame, and she refused to shave her legs. She had laughed at my jokes in high school, and after our few sessions regarding my pratfalls, she had said to my mother, in my presence, that coming from the family I came from, I was incredibly well adjusted. Nothing, she had said at the time, was wrong with me.
My mother drove me down to her office in Philadelphia. It was a different office than the one she had had at Children's Hospital; this was her private office. She was ready for me; I walked in and sat down on the couch.
"Do you w
"I was raped in a park near my school."
Dr. Graham knew our family. Knew both Mary and I were virgins.
"Well," she said, "I guess this will make you less inhibited about sex now, huh?"
I couldn't believe it. I don't remember whether I said, "That's a fucked-up thing to say." I'm sure I just wish I had. I do know that was the end of the session, that I got up and walked out.
What Dr. Graham had said came from a feminist in her thirties. Someone, I thought, who should have known better. But I was learning that no one--females included--knew what to do with a rape victim.
*
So I told a boy. His name was Steve Carbonaro. I knew him from high school. He was smart and my parents liked him--he appreciated their rugs and books. He came from a big Italian family and wanted out. Poetry was the way he chose to escape and, in this, I had more in common with him than I had with anyone else. On my parents' couch, at sixteen, we read to each other from The New Yorker Book of Poetry, and he had given me my first kiss.
I still have my journal entry from that night. After he left, I recorded, "Mom was kinda smirking at me." I went to my sister's room. She had yet to be kissed by a boy. In my journal I wrote, "Yuck, ick, uck, make me sick. I told Mary that French kissing is gross and I didn't know why you were supposed to like it. I told her she could talk to me anytime she wanted to, if she thought it was gross too."
In high school I was a reluctant partner for Steve Carbonaro. I would not go all the way. When he pressured me, I explained myself like this: I did not feel adamant about saying no, but I also didn't feel adamant about saying yes, so until I felt strongly one way or another, I'd stick with no.
By seventeen, in our senior year, Steve had moved on to a girl who would, in the parlance of high school, "put out." At the senior prom, while I danced with Tom McAllister, Steve drank. When I ran into him and his girlfriend, she bitterly informed me that she was doing well, considering that that morning she had had an abortion. Later, at Gail Stuart's party, Steve showed up with another girl, Karen Ellis. He had taken his girlfriend home.