Lucky (4 page)

The arms around me, the vague threat of physical power, were all too much.

By the end, Victor and I had an audience. It was something I would have to get used to.

Standing close to him, but separated from the embrace, I was aware of Mary Alice and of Diane. They belonged. The others were foggy and off to the side. They were watching my life as if it were a movie. In their version of the story, where did they fit? I would find out over the years that in a few versions, I was their best friend. Knowing a victim is like knowing a celebrity. Particularly when the crime is clouded in taboo. When I was doing research for this book, back in Syracuse, I met a woman like this. Without recognizing me at first, only knowing I was writing a book on Alice Sebold's rape case, she hurried in from another room and told me and those assisting me that "the victim in that case was my best friend." I had no idea who she was. When someone referred to me by name, she blinked and then came forward, embracing me to save face.

In Cindy's room, I sat down on the bed closest to the door. Cindy, Mary Alice, and Tree were there, perhaps Diane. Cindy had shooed the others out and shut her door.

It was time. I sat with the phone in my lap. My mother was only a few miles away, having driven up the day before to take me home from Syracuse. She would be up and puttering around her hotel room at the Holiday Inn. At that time she traveled with her own coffeemaker because she made decaf in her room. She was coming down from as much as ten cups of coffee a day, and restaurants weren't yet in the custom of serving decaf.

Before she had dropped me off at Ken Childs's house the evening before, we had agreed she would come to the dorm around 8:30 A.M.—a late start for her but a concession to the fact that I would have been up late saying good-bye to friends. I looked around at my girlfriends, hoping they would say, "You don't look so bad," or provide me with the single and perfect story to explain the cuts and bruises on my face—the story that I hadn't been able to come up with during the night.

Tree dialed the phone.

When my mother picked up. Tree said, "Mrs. Sebold, this is a friend of Alice's, Tree Roebeck."

Maybe my mother said hello.

"I'm going to put Alice on the phone now. She needs to speak with you."

Tree handed me the phone.

"Mom," I started.

She must not have heard what I thought was the obvious quaver in my voice. She was irritated.

"What is it, Alice? You know I'm due over soon; can't it wait?"

"Mom, I need to tell you something."

She heard it now. "What, what is it?"

I said it as if I were reading a line from a script.

"Last night I was beaten and raped in the park."

My mother said, "Oh, my God," and then, after a quick inhalation of breath, a startled gasp, she reeled herself in. "Are you all right?"

"Can you come get me, Mommy?" I asked.

She said it would be twenty minutes or so, she had to pack up and check out, but she would be there.

I hung up the phone.

Mary Alice suggested that we wait in her room until my mother arrived. Someone had bought bagels or doughnuts.

In the time since our arrival back at the dorm, students had woken up. There was hurry all around me. Many students, including my friends, were meeting parents for breakfast or rushing to bus stations and airports. People would attend to me and then switch off to finish packing. I sat with my back against the cinder-block dorm wall. As people came in and out and the door opened, I could hear bits of conversation.

"Where is she?" "Raped … "" … see her face?" " … she know him?" " … always weird … "

I had not eaten anything since the night before—since the raisins at Ken Childs's house—

and I could not look at the bagels or doughnuts without feeling what—the rapist's penis—

had last been in my mouth. I tried to stay awake. I had been up for more than twenty-four hours—far longer, what with the all-nighters that I'd pulled during finals week—but I was afraid to fall asleep before my mother got there. My girlfriends and the resident advisor, who, after all, was only nineteen, tried to take care of me, but I had begun to notice that I was now on the other side of something they could not understand. I didn't understand it myself.

While I waited for my mother, people began to leave. I ate a cracker, offered by Tree or Mary Alice. Friends were saying good-bye. Mary Alice wasn't leaving until later in the day. She had done instinctively what few people do in the face of a crisis: She had signed on for the whole ride.

I felt I needed to dress up for my mother and for the ride home. Mary Alice had already been shocked when, at Christmas and spring break, I had insisted on putting on a skirt and suit jacket to take the bus home to Pennsylvania. Both times, Mary Alice waited on the curb outside the dorm in sweatpants and a lumpy down jacket, trash bags of laundry lined up and ready to be loaded by her parents into their car. But my parents liked to see me look nice, debated my choice of clothing many mornings during high school. I had begun dieting at eleven and my weight, and how it marred my beauty, was a major topic of conversation. My father was the king of the backhanded compliment. "You look just like a Russian ballerina," he said once, "only too fat." My mother repeatedly said, "If you weren't so beautiful in the first place, it wouldn't matter." The implication being, I guess, that I was supposed to know they thought I was beautiful. The result, of course, was that I only thought I was ugly.

There was probably no better way to confirm this for me than to be raped. In high school, two boys had, in the Senior Class Will, left me toothpicks and pigment. The toothpicks were for my Asian-looking eyes, the pigment for my white skin. I was pale, always pale, and unmuscled. My lips were big and my eyes small. The morning of the rape my lips were cut, my eyes were swollen.

I put on a green and red kilt and made sure to use the kilt pin that my mother had searched stores for after we purchased the skirt. The indecency of any wrap skirt was something she underlined to me often, particularly when we saw a woman or girl who was unaware that the flap had blown open and we, her audience in parking lot or shopping mall, could see more leg than, as my mother said, "anyone would want to."

My mother believed in buying clothes big, so, as I grew up, I listened to my older sister, Mary, complain about how all the clothes Mom bought us were huge. In the dressing rooms of department stores, my mother would test the size of all pants or skirts by putting her hand in the waistband. If she couldn't easily slide her hand between our underwear and whatever outfit we were trying on, then it was too tight. If my sister complained, my mother would say, "Mary, I don't know why you insist on wanting pants that are so tight they leave nothing, and I mean nothing, to the imagination."

We sat with our legs crossed. Our hair was neat and pulled back over the ears. We were not allowed to wear jeans more than once a week until we reached high school. We had to wear a dress to school at least once a week. No heels except pumps from Pappagallo, which were primarily for church and, even then, the heels did not exceed 1.5 inches. I was told whores and waitresses chewed gum and only tiny women could wear turtlenecks and ankle straps.

I knew, now that I had been raped, I should try to look good for my parents. Having gained the regulation freshman fifteen meant that my skirt that day fit. I was trying to prove to them and to myself that I was still who I had always been. I was beautiful, if fat.

I was smart, if loud. I was good, if ruined.

While I dressed, Tricia, a representative from the Rape Crisis Center, arrived. She passed out pamphlets to my friends and left stacks of them in the front hall of the dorm. If anyone had wondered what all the commotion the night before had been about, now they knew for sure. Tricia was tall and thin with light brown hair that fell about her head in thin and wispy waves. Her approach, a sort of comforting "I'm here for you" stance, was not one I trusted. I had Mary Alice. My mother was coming. I did not appreciate the soft touch of this stranger and I did not want to belong to her club.

I got a two-minute warning that my mother was coming up the stairs. I wanted Tricia to shut up—didn't see how what she was saying could help me with this encounter—and I paced the room, wondering if I should go out and greet my mother in the hall.

"Open the door," I said to Mary Alice. I breathed deeply and stood in the middle of the room. I wanted my mother to know I was all right. Nothing could get to me. I'd been raped but I was fine.

Within seconds, I saw that my mother, who I had expected would collapse, had the kind of fresh energy that was needed to get me through the rest of that day.

"I'm here now," she said. Both of our chins wobbled when we were on the verge of tears, a trait we shared and hated.

I told her about the police, that we had to go back. They needed a formal affidavit and there were mug books to look at. My mother spoke to Tricia and to Cindy, thanked Tree and Diane, and especially Mary Alice, whom she had met previously. I watched as she took over. I let her do it, willingly, for now not questioning its toll on her.

The girls helped my mother pack and bring my things out to the car. Victor helped too. I stayed in the room. The hallway had become a difficult place for me. Doorways there led into rooms where people knew about me.

Before my mother and I took our leave, and as a final way to show her love, Mary Alice worked among the tangles in my hair to make a French braid. It was something she knew how to do that I didn't. Something she had tons of practice with, from having groomed horses whose manes she braided for competition. It hurt while she did it, my scalp was very sore from the rapist yanking and pulling me by my hair, but with each hank of hair she braided in, I tried to gather what energy I had left. I knew before Mary Alice and my mother walked me downstairs and to the car, where Mary Alice hugged me and said good-bye, that I was going to pretend, as best as I could, that I was fine.

We drove downtown to the Public Safety Building. There was this one chore before we could go home.

I looked at mug shots, but I didn't see the man who raped me. At 9:00 A.M. Sergeant Lorenz arrived and the first order of business was to take my affidavit. My body was shutting down now and I was having trouble staying awake. Lorenz led me to the interrogation room, the walls of which were covered with thick carpet. While I told my story, he sat at a desk behind an upright typewriter, typing slowly in a hunt-and-peck style. I was drifting, trying hard to remain alert, but I told him everything. It was Lorenz's job to pare it down to one page for the file and to this effect he would at times bark angrily, "That's inconsequential, just the facts." I took each reprimand for what it was: an awareness that the specificity of my rape did not matter, but only how and if it conformed to an established charge. Rape 1, Sodomy 1, etc. How he twisted my breasts or shoved his fist up inside me, my virginity: inconsequential.

Through my struggle to remain conscious, I took the temperature of this man. He was tired, fatigued, did not like the paperwork side of being a member of the Syracuse PD, and taking an affidavit in a rape case was a crappy way to start his day.

He was also uncomfortable around me. First because I was a rape victim and had facts that would make anyone uncomfortable to hear, but also because I was having trouble staying awake. He squinted hard at me, sizing me up from behind his typewriter.

When I said I did not know a man had to be erect in order to enter me, Lorenz looked over at me.

"Come on, Alice," he said and smiled. "You and I both know that isn't possible."

"I'm sorry," I said, chastened. "I don't know that, I've never had sex with a man before."

He was quiet and then looked down. "I'm not used to virgins in my line of work," he said.

I decided to like Sergeant Lorenz and to think of him as fatherly. He was the first person to whom I had uttered the details of what had happened. I could not fathom that he might not believe me.

On 8 May 811 left my friend's home on 321 Westcott St. at approx 12:00 AM. I proceeded to walk towards my dorm at 305 Waverly Ave by walking through Thorden Park. At approx 12:05 AM while walking on the path past the bathhouse and near the amphitheater I heard someone walking behind me. I started to walk faster and was suddenly overtaken from behind and grabbed around the mouth. This man said "be quiet I'm not going to hurt you, if you do what I say." He loosened up his grip on my mouth and I screamed. He then threw me on the ground and yanks my hair and said "don't ask any questions, I could kill you right now." We were both on the ground and he threatened me with a knife I never saw. He then began to struggle with me and told me to walk over to the area of the amphitheater. While walking I fell down and he became angry, grabbed my hair and pulled me into the amphitheater. He proceeded to undress me until I was left with my bra and panties. I took off my bra and panties, he told me to lie down which I did. He took off his pants and proceeded to have intercourse with me. After he was done he got up and asked me to give him a "blow job." I said that I didn't know what it meant and he said "just suck on it." He then took my head and forced my mouth on his penis.

After he was done he told me to lie down on the ground and again had intercourse with me. He fell asleep on me for a short time. He got up and helped me dress and took $9.00

from my back pocket. I was then allowed to leave and went back to Marion Dorm where I notified the University police. I wish to state that the man I encountered in the park is a Negro approx 16-18 years of age, small and muscular build of 150 lbs, wearing dark blue sweatshirt and dark jeans, with short afro-style hair cut. I desire prosecution in the event this individual is caught.

Lorenz handed me the voluntary affidavit to sign.

"It was eight dollars, not nine," I said. "And what about what he did to my breasts and his fist?" I asked. "We fought more than that." All I saw were what I thought of as the errors he had made, the things he had left out or the words he had substituted for what had actually been said.