* * *
—
A few days later I am outside my house picking up the newspapers when a man who lives a few streets over comes at me to say hello. For years he has assumed this approach. He’s twice my size, friendly but overbearing, and his idea of hello is an uninvited bone-crushing hug. And usually I smile and wince, try to fend him off. But today is different. Today I have already heard of a group of young boys grabbing a girl in the schoolyard, saying, “Trump is going to be our president, so we can do this now.” Today I am livid, sick of carrying around a lifetime of forgiveness for strangers and oafs. So when he approaches, his arms outreached, I pivot and face him, my arm up to block the pass, and something in my eyes stops him cold. He is like the Road Runner braking before the cliff; he fumbles, then thrusts out a hand instead. I shake it, hard, while his other arm flails in space. He sputters. “Would you like a hug?”
I smile and say, “No, I’m good, thanks,” and this does the job. He looks deflated, like a dog who understands a growl. When I turn to walk down my driveway I feel a rush of endorphins. So this is how it feels to make them go away, instead of apologizing for their idiocy, for boys being boys. Instead of internalizing all that rage, turning it into shame or despair. Using the sword instead of swallowing it.
4
I emerged into the world beyond Amarillo a shy, lanky girl with one serious heartbreak behind me and a semi-secret desire to study mathematics. In the ninth grade I’d been blessed with a severe and passionate algebra teacher, Mrs. Springer, who had lost a breast to cancer and chose not to mask it. She was tall, thin, serious, and wore formfitting sweaters that emphasized her angular asymmetry.
There was something breathtaking about Mrs. Springer’s brazenness. It was as though she had seen the worst, and still gone on to hammer the binomial theorem into her students. She seemed fearless, and those of us who weren’t afraid of her would do anything to please her.
I don’t know when or if I ever linked Mrs. Springer’s one-breasted warrior status to the myth about the Amazons, that they cut off a breast because it got in the way of their bow. I do know that my redheaded teacher was critical to my self-regard as well as education: she with her holy chalk and her to-hell-with-it, half-flattened chest. I was thirteen, and I worshipped her. She recognized in me some aptitude and yearning for math that made her tender toward me. One day she pulled me aside from the mean-girl cheerleaders I desperately wanted to impress.
The advice that she gave me—that a brain for math was more important than cheerleading or popularity—I could only partly absorb. I was on the verge of adolescence, when I would go from no breasts to all breasts at alarming speed, and when the beauty of mathematics was a private sanctuary for me, not something for which I wanted to sacrifice friends or boys. I didn’t yet realize there would be a choice. Why would being smart have anything to do with being in love? Couldn’t you swoon over polynomials and the Beatles at the same time?
Mrs. Springer’s nudging and my standardized math scores carried me a certain distance, far enough for me to declare mathematics as a major when I got to college in 1968. My first two years of college were at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, a serious cattle town two hours south of Amarillo, and I spent most of my first semester trying to survive an honors calculus course that met five days a week. I was one of four girls in a class of about fifty. We scattered ourselves wide across the room from the first day, as though we were afraid to be seen in one another’s company. Our chunky, gravel-voiced teacher chain-smoked—four packs of Kents a day, he announced—and covered the chalkboard in elegant, incomprehensible loops and curves. He tensed his buttocks muscles continuously as he stood at the board. This made him a foil for half the class.
I probably remember his physical tic because of how heartless Professor Mean turned out to be. I could not grasp what he was teaching. All of my quicksilver learning skills in algebra and trigonometry were gone. I studied for hours for the midterm—the first time in my life I’d ever had to study math—and still came in dismally. The professor scorned the females—three of us had done poorly, and half the class had flunked the exam. He had a private meeting with each of the girls, where we were counseled, with brutal nonchalance, to drop the class. Girls didn’t belong in calculus, he told me, and my grade proved it. By December, only one woman was left; I had already fled, with shame and relief.
Well, so what? I won’t entirely lay this change of plans at Professor Mean’s door; were I destined to be a math star, I’d have made it far past the likes of him. And leaving calculus showed me a different road. But my heart still aches a little for what I didn’t learn in that class, in those pre-wildness years, the way you can rue a love you didn’t marry. Everything went a little south for me after that, and I can’t know if my failed affair with math had anything to do with it. But for me, calculus was the one that got away.
SINCE THE FIRST DAYS OF Tyler’s visits, these are some of the leaps of cognition she has made: She no longer thinks that Tula and Shiloh, the Belgian sheepdog who lives down the street, are sisters or, for that matter, my daughters. She understands that Peter and Pat—the humans who go along with Shiloh—actually have their own house, rather than the giant, amorphous dormitory for us all that she first imagined. After months of repeat explorations, she knows that my house—the whole house! as she exclaims—belongs to me and Tula, though she has claimed one upstairs room as her own.
She is figuring out the world, spatially and emotionally, with downhill ease, and whenever anything trips her up she gets frustrated. She hates to admit when she doesn’t know something. If she is feeling stubborn, and I ask if she wants to know a word’s meaning, she rolls her eyes and says, “I’m not really interested.” Then she goes home and learns the word. Her vocabulary is random and enchanting: “preposterous,” “willy-nilly.” I try to mute how much I love her because she will wrinkle her nose or fling herself into the backyard with Tula. But she does tell me she wants a palomino mare when she grows up and plans to name her Gail.
“So, who was your first boyfriend?” Every week or two I am surprised by her leap into the unknown. But I always offer a version of the truth that will fit her expanding worldview. I tell her about a boy I liked when I was four or five, a shy kid named Mike, and she clearly knows I am patronizing her and wants the real thing. So I say, Well, when I was thirteen someone asked me to go steady. “Just tell me,” she responds, which is her usual rejoinder when she is intrigued. “I said yes because I liked the color of his St. Christopher medal,” I say. “That’s what you got to wear if you were going steady with a boy. His St. Christopher was dark red.
“Then he kissed me at the local movie theater,” I say, “and I immediately broke up with him.” She wrinkles her nose in understanding and we both laugh demonically.
5
My social life in Lubbock was more fluid than my math pursuits and far more dangerous. I had always liked boys and had them as friends, and I went to a few rodeos and met some sweet guys and sat around drinking coffee with girls from the dorm. By the end of those two years I had a gentle, flower-child boyfriend with a long ponytail who rode a 750 Yamaha motorcycle. But there were a few skunks in the meadow before I found him. The first was a graduate student I’d met through a dorm-mate’s boyfriend at the local coffee shop, and I was flattered by his attention—I was seventeen and he was handsome and a few years older, a serious student of English literature. Compared to the cowboys and business majors that covered Texas Tech’s campus, this was exotic stuff. At the end of our date, he parked his car at the dark end of the dorm parking lot, lunged across the front seat and grabbed both my breasts, as though he were a blind calf in search of his mother. I was horrified. It was one of the least erotic gestures of my young life, and even in the midst of it he seemed like an idiot. I pushed him off and got out of the car. The memory makes me roll my eyes even now.
I was not so lucky in a later encou
nter, with a frat boy I’ll call Jay, whom I had made the mistake of sleeping with one night in a determined effort to get over my first love. America was well into the sexual revolution by the late 1960s, but the Panhandle was not exactly Berkeley, and my relative innocence had yet to catch up with the headlines. I’d had sex only with my high school boyfriend, and two years after our breakup, I made the dispassionate choice to widen my horizon. The boy I picked was handsome, loud, fun, and forgettable. I went home to Amarillo for the summer and learned how to smoke dope, which did a much better job of horizon-widening. When I returned to Lubbock that fall, in what would be my last year there, I ran into Jay at a friend’s off-campus apartment. He had been drinking and I had not; instead I’d had a few hits of Acapulco Gold, and was stoned enough to want to lie in a field and stare at the stars for the rest of my life.
Jay insisted I go for a ride with him so that we could talk. I had rebuffed his advances when I got back to town and I felt guilty; I assumed he wanted to convince me that we should try again. I also thought we could have this one conversation and be done. But in the car he fell silent and wouldn’t say where we were going. We drove up to a dark little house, a place he said belonged to a friend, where he’d forgotten his jacket. We would only be a minute, he said. I was relieved to be out of the car and went with him inside. My clueless walk into the abattoir.
It was decades before I heard the term “date rape,” and I remember thinking, at once, Oh, that’s what Jay did to me. He threw me across the bed in the front room; I think he slapped me; I know he raped me. The assault was impersonal and mechanical. What I can still feel is my absolute stillness—the way I turned into a statue, inside and out. I remember staring at the ceiling and thinking, Oh my God I’m so stoned, this is so horrible and I am so stoned. I was infused with an out-of-body horror, more anger than fear, but outwardly, I was a cool customer. When he got off me I rearranged my clothes. I did nothing, said nothing, walked back to the car. He may have had a moment’s chagrin, because he said quietly that he would take me back to the apartment where my friends were waiting.
Behind the wheel, though, his drunken rage—at himself? at me?—got the better of him. He started yelling and beating on the dashboard as he drove. Slut, whore, bitch, he called me; I had my hand on the door handle for the entire ride. When he pulled up to the apartment complex, he veered into a parking place and slammed on the brakes. I got out of the car and walked around to the driver’s side, where his window was open. My voice was shaking. This was the first time I’d said a word.
“You no-good son-of-a…” I didn’t get to finish. He leapt out of the car and threw me against the brick wall of the apartment building. He backhanded me, once, across the face, got in the car, and drove away. I had the bruise for a week.
What do I remember feeling about all this, so long ago? Disdain. Fury. Regret over my bad judgment—not that I had slept with someone, but that I had picked a whiskey-loving frat boy with no cool and no respect for women. That I had foolishly put myself in harm’s way, because I’d gotten involved, for all the wrong reasons, with someone I didn’t know well who turned out to be a violent loser.
For years I felt blessed that I had escaped any damaging aftermath from this experience. My outrage probably saved me from internalizing some of the classic trauma of sexual assault. But a subtler shift took place: the little erosions of faith that add up to wariness, or steely skepticism, or cynicism too tough to penetrate. It’s an emotional runoff that happens over years and decades, and like any cultural norm it shapes you in immeasurable ways.
You can’t read this story, or even write it, without thinking, Did you tell, why didn’t you tell, why didn’t you call the police, why didn’t you report it?
It makes me sad now to realize that telling—anyone, any kind of protest—never occurred to me.
And when the woman told the story about being seated on a plane next to Trump in first class, where she said he grabbed her, when the woman in the bar remembered his hand up her skirt, when any number of women and girls recalled his storming the dressing rooms or throwing them against a wall, I thought, Yeah, well, of course you didn’t mention it. We so rarely do. Or rather, did. “Honey, it’s always been this way.”
So no, I never thought to tell. I suppose you could say I hated the man for it, but mostly I tried to forget that night, and after a while I didn’t think about him. There were a dozen ways to walk away from the memory, and I used them all. Smoked a lot of dope. Found a hippie boyfriend who loved women and made me laugh and gave me a blueprint for the next part of my life. It was easy to disdain the frat boys when you were poised on the brink of what seemed a revolution, and I was on my way to the den of iniquity, as my mother called it, in the counterculture hotbed of Austin. And so Date Rape Jay became part of a macho culture I was already fleeing—loutish men and empty plains, honed into an image of the past I could leave behind.
6
Cambridge, 2016
Two weeks after the election, and people are beginning to form in throngs on the street. I am raking leaves in the dark when Jim, my next-door neighbor, calls out, “Are you raking in the dark because you want to be left alone?” We laugh together, take solace in our shared inability to sleep. The people across the way gather in my driveway. The tools we’re using to combat this collective despair are humor, Xanax, organizing. In January there will be a women’s march in Washington; the sister march in Boston will have more than a million people on the street.
I live in a state that is historically progressive and Democratic, a college town whose self-definition is so urbane—sophistication bumping into smug—that its designation as “the People’s Republic of Cambridge” is both earned and pejorative. But I grew up in the Bible Belt, spent the first nineteen years of my life in the midst of hardcore churchgoers and blindingly white conservatives. Whenever I returned there I learned how to go native, blend in like a lizard on a rock, listen to the heart and mind behind the right-wing politics or the born-again faith. It was important to me to do this, because it helped me connect with people and made me feel like I understood the character formed on those high plains. Maybe I was wrong; maybe I understood nothing. But the effort to identify opened me up. I have clung to this binocular vision, or tried to, through all the decades I’ve lived in the Northeast, believing it affords me emotional access to people I might otherwise judge, or separate myself from.
This time around, a different world. No one is laughing, or sparring; there are no good-natured efforts to agree to disagree. I have a long-scheduled appointment with my primary care physician, whom I have known for years. When I fill out the usual pre-visit forms, I note with new irony the standard annual screening for depression.
PLEASE CHECK ANY THAT APPLY:
❑ Have you been feeling anxious or desperate in the past two weeks?
❑ Have you had trouble sleeping?
❑ Have you had trouble engaging in your usual hobbies or activities?
Check, check, check, I wrote, with a little asterisk by each and a note: “post-election.”
Dr. Ranere laughs when he sees my note. “You and everybody else,” he says. He knows I’m in generally good health and my genetic draw is pretty straightforward; if alcoholism or suicide doesn’t get you in my family, you tend to live for a long time. My problems are orthopedic and what my therapist calls little-d depression. I take my vitamin-Z Zoloft to seal off the basement door, surround myself with dogs, walk and row and swim to stave off arthritis and the late effects of the polio I had as an infant. If I’m not limping or sad, I’m in pretty good shape. I am not, for instance, sticking my head in the oven, like my Uncle Roy did after leaving a seven-page suicide note. I’ve avoided shock treatments, four lousy marriages, bankruptcy, and the chlorine gas of World War I—all of which happened to relatives on both sides of the gene pool. So when I calculate the odds, I did all right. I had my last drink to date
more than thirty years ago. That’s really something.
I suppose you could say that, after all the ordinary pushing and shoving of life, I am an educated, self-sufficient feminist and registered Democrat who gives her money to liberal causes, subscribes to three newspapers, and is not afraid of bullies. Multiplied by many million, I am Donald Trump’s worst nightmare.
TYLER IS LEARNING HOW TO read, though she doesn’t realize it yet. I see it when she calls her mother from my landline and sounds out the numbers and letters on the keypad. One day after she hangs up I hear her say “OFF” as she presses the button, and I say, “You can read!” And she says, amazed, “I can?” as though I have told her she can fly. She has not yet made the magical leap where she knows what she knows, and so reading—the thought of it—still occupies a mysterious place in the future. But her grasping what she has done is powerful mojo, a hint of what lies ahead. Today, “OFF.” Tomorrow, Proust.
I teach her to type on my mother’s old Royal manual typewriter, a thirty-five-pound hunk of steel built in the 1940s that she made her living with for years. I learned to type on it when I was fourteen or fifteen, and the smell of the ink and the carriage’s ding elicit an out-of-time pleasure—I like the notion of several generations pounding this machine. Tyler sits at the typewriter and gazes off into space with her finger on her chin, as though impersonating a moody, thoughtful writer. Then she types wildly, jamming the keys, mostly garble but occasionally words: TULA, Tyler. “How do you spell ‘Shiloh,’ ” she calls, and I realize she’s going for broke. Then one day she gets a full sentence. “Tyler GOEZ TO se GAIL AND TULA.” She rips the paper from the carriage and thrusts it toward me, and says, “Now you will never forget me!”
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