Real Life (8 page)

And, she tells herself, if you never told anybody, you can hardly be the only raped woman who reacted that way. Remember dating when you were a college student? Most dates wound up in wrestling matches. You expected them, there was an unspoken accord: he would try, you would say no, at a certain point you’d either give in or he would realize you meant it and stop. Sometimes he went further than the accord allowed, and if he did, you didn’t go out with him again. It was a dangerous game, but the only one. Now she thinks that maybe she’d been lucky there too and her girlfriends were being raped and not telling anyone.

Besides, the only reason she didn’t give in was that her mother had told her she shouldn’t, so had the nuns and priests who’d educated her, and her girlfriends, and even the boys who were her friends, counselling her sagely and whispering about girls they all knew who were easy. If you didn’t resist, it was absolutely clear, the life you were being groomed for would be over, and that was a price too high for anybody to pay.

Then, abruptly, when she was in her late twenties and newly divorced, all that ended. Suddenly, making love was socially acceptable, a positive good, everybody was doing it, it was expected. She thinks that probably almost nobody was doing it as much as they implied they were—she, for one, wasn’t—but the point was that you could if you wanted to and nobody would call you a slut or a whore or easy. Nobody would say anything at all.

I never even noticed him,
she thinks. A dozen of them together
in a club at one big table, her girlfriends, somebody’s husband, a few male friends who were always around, and him, the rapist, a stranger, a house guest of one of the men. They hadn’t even sat close together. When she thought about that night, she remembered he’d sat on the opposite side of the table at the far end, and when she thought harder about it, she’d remembered he’d asked her to dance, that he hadn’t been a good dancer, that they’d danced once, then sat down. She hadn’t even talked to him, and she hadn’t liked him because he was so silent and his silence had a heavy impenetrableness to it that made her wonder why he’d asked her to dance.

The reason she didn’t at first remember dancing with him was that sitting at a table behind them was a man she’d had an affair with and, in a forlorn way, was still in love with. He was sitting with a woman; by the way he was acting she could tell he was in love. When she’d noticed him and smiled and waved, he’d deliberately looked away without even nodding. She’d been so wounded by this unexpected, deliberate, and undeserved slight that all enjoyment was leached from the evening, and after a while, it was barely midnight, she’d gotten up, said goodnight, and left.

But then, she thinks, I do remember that the man I’d danced with stood up when he noticed I was leaving, that as I was walking away he was hastily trying to make change to settle his share of the bill. And I hurried out of the club, and I kept telling myself he wasn’t leaving because of me. And yet, as I passed the shadowed street behind the club, I thought seriously of stepping into it and hiding against a building till he’d gone by. I didn’t, my training to stay on well-lit streets was too strong, and besides, I kept thinking I was imagining things, that he wasn’t going to follow me, or if he was, it was only because my house and the house he was staying in were near each other.

Even now, after all these years, after all the times she’s
remembered the details of that night, she can still see the comforting shadows of that narrow side street. She remembers clearly how she hesitated, how close she came to taking those few quick steps that would have saved her, and how she didn’t, telling herself not to be silly, not to be melodramatic.

I never told anyone, she thinks, because if I did, how could I maintain my dignity, my good name, my social standing as a decent woman? I was a divorcée, I was in a nightclub unescorted, I’d had affairs, I’d slept with men I’d just met. I’d violated all the codes I was raised with, had become all the things a dozen years before I’d fought with my dates not to become. This is why for twenty-five years I couldn’t tell this story. Because it was all my fault; I had been asking for it.

Is that why I refused to think about it? she asks herself. Because I couldn’t face that awful truth? That everyone would think I should have expected it, given my lifestyle? That because of it nobody would care? She knows that was part of it: her pride kept her silent, and her stubborn belief in her own strength to endure even the worst that fate might have in store for her.

For all those years she hasn’t allowed herself to think about it, except inadvertently, stopping herself as soon as she noticed she was. Now, her dark secret out in the open at last, she’s driven obsessively to remember it clearly, in every detail. Despite the new climate of opinion, she still suspects it really was her fault, as she’d thought for all these years, something she’d earned, and has no right to be troubled or angry about. She needs to know the truth about it, either to accept the blame or to at last feel the outrage she’s told she has a right to.

No, it’s more than that, she thinks. She’s reached a time when she needs to study her rape from every possible angle in order to at last discover its true meaning; she’s driven to gathering together all the details of her life, every single one. She’s
weaving them into a precise tapestry—her finished life—something, when she reaches old age, she’ll be able to glance at with awe and in contentment, everything sorted and in its place, all passions wiped away, everything clearly what it is and nothing more.

She knows that what happened to her was trivial compared to the rapes other women have endured. She wasn’t even really frightened, not at any time during the whole thing. He scared me, the way when I got my key out he stood close to me, and when I tried to slip inside first and shut the door on him, he put his leg in the gap, shoved, and was inside. Then I was scared, she thinks, but not terrified, just scared, because I knew he would try to force me to have sex. I didn’t think beyond that, because he was a close friend of a man I trusted, and I couldn’t believe anybody that man cared about would be capable of anything really bad like maybe—murder. As he pushed his way in, I believe I clung to that thought.

She remembers he put his arms around her and kissed her in the darkness of her living room—I don’t remember anything about that part, she tells herself—and said, “Where’s the bedroom?” He thought it was upstairs and was pushing her toward it and she said, “No, not upstairs,” thinking if he couldn’t find the bedroom she’d be safe, but the moon was so bright and they were at the bottom of the stairs and it was through the open door beside them, they could see the moonlight shining on the satin spread.

She can’t remember exactly about her clothes. She would have been wearing jeans, she doesn’t know how they came off. She remembers his belt buckle hurting her and him raising up to undo it while he kept one forearm across her chest. She fought with him, pushed against him, tried to hold her legs together, to bring her knees up, to shove him away, but it was hopeless. In the one effort when she used all her strength to
throw him off, he responded by using his strength to hold her down. She knew when she felt his masculine power that if she didn’t stop fighting him, he not only could hurt her, he would. It seemed the only sensible thing to do was to give in.

Somehow the sex didn’t matter much, not at the time, anyway. It was horrible and disgusting, but it was his action, not hers, so she wasn’t disgusting, he was. That was what she was thinking as it happened, that it wasn’t much, it wasn’t anything. After, she pretended she was asleep. He pushed her a bit or something, she doesn’t clearly remember what, and then he just left. Got up, pulled on his pants, walked out.

She remembers how the second she heard the door shut she leaped off the bed and locked it. She doesn’t know if she saw this through the window or if she imagined it, but she sees him hesitate and look over his shoulder when he hears the bolt snap shut. As if it just occurred to him she might be mad at him or afraid of him, as if up to that moment it never occurred to him that she had any feelings at all. Or maybe she was going to call the police. She remembers she thought of them for only one brief instant, shuddering at what they might say to her. No, she never seriously considered the police, but she thinks at that moment it might have crossed his mind, and for an instant
he
was afraid.

Then I just walked around the house in the dark, she remembers, didn’t even put on any lights. Just walked around from room to room and looked out the windows at the moonlight. And I felt so bad. I felt that life was too awful to want to live. That I wasn’t loved by anyone, that I wasn’t—I was going to say, fit to live, she thinks, but that sounds like all those women on
TV
and radio and in magazines who are so excessive. Anyway, it wasn’t quite like that.

I was fighting this terrible sense of loss and the ugliness of life. I would never recover from this because I had been so
defiled, and all the things I’d believed in, all the things I’d tried to be, one silent, well-muscled stranger could destroy in a minute. Could make me feel I was a fool, and alien, too, to the loving, clean world I was raised in because I was so bad, so guilty, so big a liar about myself.

Yet, as well as she can remember, she didn’t think of suicide. Instead, she’d been plunged down into an echoing underworld whose very air was made of something more resonant and more meaningful than mere pain, and the place was so far down and so dark she couldn’t pull herself out of it, couldn’t even think of escaping, couldn’t think at all. Now she sees it was the place that at bottom holds death, and she sees she’d been aware of it then, but beyond action of any kind.

This is why she feels no outrage, only this bottomless, unending sorrow whenever she thinks of it. That he had no right was never in question, but—if only she could hold onto that glimmer she sometimes catches of some greater wisdom that might tell her what she really wonders: why so small a thing, that didn’t even leave a bruise, made her feel so bad.

Eventually she must have simply gone to sleep. The next day she got up and went to work and looked after her children when they returned from visiting their grandparents, and kept on going to work and doing all the things she was supposed to do—doing them badly sometimes, fitfully, failing as often as she succeeded, being an ordinary, normal human being, she supposes, and didn’t even try to kill herself.

She regards it also as ironic that the night she heard herself say out loud she’d been raped, the mutual friend she and her new acquaintance had been talking about was the man who’d sat behind her in the club that night, the man she’d been in love with, who’d refused even to say hello. She remembers how his deliberate turning away from her had hurt as much as if he’d slapped her. Even now she can’t think why he’d done that, and
she’s surprised to find it stands out in her memory as one of the worst hurts she’s had to endure.

Now she remembers something else that hovered on the edge of her memory all these years. The day afterward, coming home from work to discover she’d forgotten her keys, she’d had to break a pane of glass in the French doors in the dining room to get in. A few nights later a male friend walked her home from the movie she’d been to with her friends. She must have invited him in, because she remembers when he saw the broken glass lying where she’d left it on the dining-room floor, he’d picked up every shard and put it all in the garbage. She remembers the strange way he did it, glancing at her once, not listening to her feeble protest that she’d do it herself in the morning, but bending so quietly and carefully, with an air of the most complete gentleness, a sort of tenderness toward her for which she could find no explanation.

Neither of them spoke as he worked, but it was as if they both knew this was something she was unable to do herself, something she needed help with. Even now she doesn’t know why she couldn’t do it, and she remembers how as she watched him work she had been filled with gratitude, she nearly wept for his kindness. Yet try as she might, she can’t remember his face or his name, only his gentleness, and the sound of his broom brushing over the hardwood floor, sweeping up the last particles of broken glass.

        Astrid Park heard the news after school on Friday in the district’s one grocery store.

“What?” she said, too loudly, in surprise. Then, because the storeowners were known to be in sympathy with the church, she asked softly, “Are you sure?” The woman who’d spoken to her was Chantal’s mother. Chantal was in Astrid’s grade three class.

“No, it’s for real,” Mrs. Terry told her, reaching for the broccoli which, as usual, had seen better days. “One of the preacher’s kids, Rebekah, told Chantal. Scared her, I can tell you. Eyes as big as saucers!” She shook her head, her lips pursed, and tossed the broccoli back into the bin. This far north it was impossible to get fresh produce.

“And the date?” Astrid asked.

“Next Saturday night,” Mrs. Terry told her. “You don’t think the world would end on a weekday, do you? Chantal said two in the morning, I think.” She dropped a package of limp carrots into her basket. For some time after Mrs. Terry had moved away, Astrid stood staring at the bins of shrivelled and faded vegetables. A lot of the children in the school belonged to the church—God’s Saints or Church of Holy Brethren—she wasn’t sure which one it was. Maybe their parents would keep
them at home the next few days, in view of the fact that the world was going to end on Saturday. If they did, that would set them apart psychologically from the rest of the community, she thought, it would make it easier to calm the others.

She wondered if Warren, the school principal, had heard, and then was sure he had. He’d been in the community fifteen years and knew everybody in town—not hard in a village of fifty—and the country parents as well, since he lived on an acreage a few miles from town, while Astrid, in the middle of her second year here, chose to keep to herself, seeing adults only at parent-teacher interviews, various school ceremonies, and the extracurricular activities she supervised. She didn’t even attend the annual fowl supper that absolutely everybody went to. She had no need for society, she told herself, when she thought about it at all, but what she really felt was a kind of horror that she might settle in here and begin to live as everyone else did, that if she did the things they did, she might become just like them.