Denial (3 page)

I also reported to the police that someone had left a handwritten poem in my bedroom, soon after the rape. I see in the file that the police questioned my father. He, too, had a hard time believing me. How would a person get a poem into the house without being noticed? How would he know when it would be safe to stop by our house, walk up to my bedroom? How could he know when no one would be home? Neither my father nor the police believed this strange story then, and I don't believe it now. I see what I told the police and feel ashamed. Why would I lie to the police?

But in the back of the file, I find the poem. Here it is:

How could I have forgotten this poem? I do not know what to make of it.

I do remember the fact that I was raped. I can force myself to recall certain details. The fact that we thought he was joking when he told us he had a gun. We thought he was joking until he threatened to kill us. The fact, missing, for some reason, from the written record, that he asked us to show him where the knives were kept.

The police asked my sister and me to write down what had occurred. We did this, the report states, between 11:30
PM
and 1:45
AM
. Those words are before me now. I read the words I know I wrote, in a penmanship I barely recognize. My notes from 1973 are written in italics below.

The penmanship looks alien. I don't recognize the persona captured in these words, the writing slanting backward, the letters round, fat. Was I ever this feminine?

I try to imagine “man walked in.” I feel a kind of chemical strength. Not fear, not sadness, but a chemical agitation.

Reading these words, I feel a jarring in me, something quite hard and harsh forming in my veins, as if my blood were forming shards. This is a familiar feeling. I become a soldier if I am truly threatened. If the plane goes down, you want me at the controls.

Here is what I think now, reading what I wrote down for the police at age fifteen, right after I was raped. I was a good girl. Always a good girl, even when I was bad. I did my homework.

If I can only be good enough, someone will eventually notice that I am trying so hard, exhausting myself with my effort to be good. This is true even today.

I knew what good means. Good means never revealing fear. Good means not complaining about things that can't be changed, like the presence of a strange gunman in the house instructing me not to scream. Of course I won't scream, I didn't scream then, I won't scream now, certainly not out of fear or the thought of my own pain. I was not one of those hysterical girls who flinches or screams in the face of “man walked in” or “showed us gun.” I knew that if I were bad, if I revealed my terror, he would kill me. I already knew how to absorb fear into my body—my own and others'—to project a state of utter calm and courage.

Of course I looked down, not at his face. I understood the simple bargain: no looking, no flinching, no sudden movements, stay alive. Looking where he said to look.

What terror would I have seen in his face? I would have drowned in a sea of fear.

Well, that is easy, only five or ten. If anyone else were home, they might not have known how to handle this man. But I did. Be quiet, he said. If you say anything, he said, I will kill you.

I was quiet.

My sister remembers this expedition, the three of us walking single file, up the narrow flight of stairs, his gun to our backs. “I thought we were being marched to our execution,” she recalls. “I was trying to telegraph to you to be quiet. My biggest fear was that you wouldn't comply and that you would get killed.” Why was my sister afraid that I would be the one killed?

In any case, I did comply. I floated into docility.

The shades hiding our shame.

The pants covering our shameful spots. The vulnerable spots now exposed. Would we still be clothed? We were wearing leotards. But I know the answer to that question now: I would never be clothed again.

We had ridden our bikes home from ballet class, jeans over our leotards. We were unspoiled and tough, unlike other girls, the kind whose parents might have driven them across town, the kind who might have screamed.

But now skin is revealed, legs exposed to cold air. Still, I did not scream.

I recall thinking that if I did what he said, we would stay alive. Don't scream, don't protest. I cannot recall the sensation of facedown on bed. Did the blanket scratch the cheeks and mouth, the mouth that would be good, that would not scream? Did the blankets comfort, did they suffocate?

How did those dresses feel on the skin that no longer seemed like mine, the “I” that I no longer know? Did I know that soon after putting on a dress, I would have to take it off?

I do recall “man walked in”: I can see a kind of apparition in my mind's eye. I do recall the threat to kill us if we spoke. But now I am lost. My mind cannot focus. An apparition of cold flits across my heart but is gone so soon I wonder if I imagined it. I am annoyed with this little girl whom I'm struggling to hold in my mind's eye, who wants me to understand how she suffered. You will be fine, I want to tell her. I feel anger at her, even more than “man walked in.” I do not want to hear about her fear or her pain. It wasn't that bad.

Now I begin to feel something new. A foggy nausea takes hold, leaving no room for thoughts or action. Why didn't I bite hard? Would it have been worth it to hurt this man, even if he killed me? Did I have the strength in my jaw to bite? I think not. I was in a sea of nothingness.

Who spread those legs? How vulnerable I feel, thinking of this girl, her legs spread wide, exposed to this “man walked in,” exposed to an evil cold.

Yes.

I do remember the hurt, as if someone had inserted a gun made of granite that scraped my flesh raw, at first scratching, then tearing, then scraping the flesh off bone, leaving the bone sterilized by pain.

I am hollow and sterilized now. Not long after the rape, I lost my ability to urinate. I had to be catheterized, and later hospitalized. I began to walk with crotch held back to prevent intruders, muscles so tight I have to will myself to urinate, sometimes even now.

Now he turned his attention to my little sister.

How did I find the strength to talk? I was spellbound by the potential for death contained in that gun, entranced into a statuelike calm. An animal intelligence had taken over where an “I” once held at least the illusion of dominion, where thoughts and action were once connected. The “I” was lured away into a space of infinite white, a space of no feeling other than calm, far from the human world, entranced into leaving its normal home—my body—by this man's insistence that he would kill me if I spoke. The animal mind that took over when the “I” had gone ordered the body that remained behind to be passive, silent, and calm, knowing, in its animal way, that compliance was required to keep the body alive.

But now there was something more important than sustaining the life of that body, something that knocked that shameless and shameful animal-mind back to its rightful place, a place I know nothing of, that I want to know nothing of, in this life. My little sister's pain pulled me out of my trance, and an “I” returned, determined to protect her; but I don't believe that the “I” that came back was the same “I” that my body had housed before. The new self that emerged was like a baby, having never been exposed to the world. The world felt new to me, baby that I was, more penetrated by sound. The sounds that had once thrilled me with feeling now grated on my ear. I had been playing Bach's third
French Suite, Debussy's “Engulfed Cathedral,” and Beethoven's
Pathétique
before the hour the rapist spent playing with our lives, perhaps, so we thought, planning to kill us when he was finished with us. Where I once heard—in my mind's ear—a cathedral rising from a Turner-like mist, I now heard scrapes and moans rising from the piano keys under my fingers when I played.

I have trouble forcing my eye back to the page where I wrote the actions performed on me and by me during that very long hour.

Was he just a broken boy, needing someone to wrap her legs around him? This thought nauseates me again. A broken boy, stabbing and piercing a broken girl, leaving her shattered, as he was shattered. Why did I perceive him as broken even then, before I knew anything about him, before I knew anything about violence?

I remember what happened next: the click of his gun. I thought he was cocking it, preparing to kill. I was calm again, entranced into complying with his murderous plans.

Here is what shames me to the core: I thought he was going to kill me, but I did not fight him. I was hypnotized into passivity. I had no strength to run, and anyway I did not like the idea of being shot from behind. It seemed easier just to wait until the murder was done with.

There was no sex in that room. No love. But there was a seduction. The seduction of death.

Would he kill just one of us, making the other angry? Would he kill both of us, imagining that we would be angry at him in heaven, after our deaths? Why didn't I get up? Why remain “facedown on bed”? Why did I not rise up, Medusa-like, eyes flashing, the snakes in my hair ready to strike him dead? Why did I not overpower the puny little man, smack that gun out of his paltry, worm-white fingers? I was strong then, probably stronger than he, certainly very strong now.

And then he explained to us that the gun was not real, it was a cap gun.

I wrote dutifully, always dutiful. After complying with the rapist I complied with the police. Was this the most embarrassing part—that I had been entranced by the thought of a gun? That my fear, unfelt even as it was, had hypnotized me into complying with a person, if he was indeed a person and not an apparition, wielding a child's toy, not an instrument of death?

I remember this part, too. I told Sara he was right; we shouldn't call the police. Somehow, even then, I felt him as a victim. I told her that they would put him in prison, that prison would not reform him: it would make him worse.

After he left, I saw in my mind's eye the image of a broken man, more broken still by the violence he would encounter behind bars, emerging as a true monster, a rapist who would ac
tually kill his victims rather than leave them only half dead. It may be, I know now, that this intuition was correct. Was this a kind of Stockholm syndrome? Does it happen that fast, in the space of an hour?

Sara was more afraid than I, but also more alive. She retained a human-like strength in her arms and hands and mind that I now lacked. She insisted. She picked up the phone. No dial tone. He had cut the wires. He had cut the wires in the basement, a big puzzle. How would a rapist have time to cut the phone wires or know where to find them in the dark, dank basement? How long had he been in the house? How long had he been plotting this crime?