It could have been me who found herself in a moment in which my fate was not my own, my body was not my own, my life was not my own, and I hovered on that brink and was haunted by it for a few years that reshaped my psyche in ways that will never be over. Which was, perhaps, the point: to remind me that I would never be entirely free. This violence mostly targets girls and young women as an initiation rite, a reminder that even after you cease to be a frequent target you’re vulnerable. Each death of a woman was a message to women in general, and in those days I was tuned in to survival with a kind of dread and shock at finding out that I lived in an undeclared war. I wanted it declared, and I have to the best of my ability declared it myself from time to time.
It was popular in the media and polite conversation to pretend that murderers and rapists were marginal men, them and not us, but during that time a white man who was a bank vice president strangled a teenage sex worker in my suburban hometown not quite thirty miles north of San Francisco while his wife and daughters were at Girl Scout camp. It was the era of the Night Stalker and the middle-aged white man known as the Trailside Killer (who raped and killed women hikers on the trails I hiked on) and the Pillowcase Rapist and the Beauty Queen Killer and the Green River Killer and the Ski Mask Rapist and many other men who rampaged up and down the Pacific Coast without nicknames.
Two or three years before this narrative begins, a fifteen-year-old runaway had been kidnapped near San Francisco, raped, and had her forearms chopped off by her rapist, who assumed she’d bleed to death in the culvert he dumped her in. She lived to testify and went on to make an ordinary life for herself. He murdered another woman when he got out of prison. Her story haunted me and the friend who’d given me the desk. I found it again in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, where Lavinia is raped and has her hands cut off and her tongue cut out to silence her but manages anyway to convey who ravaged her. And again in Greek mythology, when, after he rapes her, Philomela’s brother-in-law cuts out her tongue to silence her.
I’ve heard and read many accounts by women who were impacted by a single brutal attack, but the horror for me lay in the pervasiveness of this violence. I had a sense of dread in those days, a sense that the imminent future of my body might be excruciating and horrifying. There was a mouth of rage that wanted to devour me into nothing, and it might open up almost anywhere on earth.
3
I had never been safe, but I think some of the horror that hit me was because for a few years I had thought that maybe I could be, that male violence had been contained in the home I grew up in, and so I could leave it behind. I wrote once that I grew up in an inside-out world where everywhere but the house was safe, and everyplace else had seemed safe enough as a child in a subdivision on the edge of the country, where I roamed freely into town or into the hills that were both right out the door. I’d yearned to leave home and planned to do so since I was a child in single digits making lists of what to take to run away. Once I left home I was almost never in danger inside my home again, but by then home often felt like the only place I was safe.
At twelve and thirteen and fourteen and fifteen, I had been pursued and pressured for sex by adult men on the edge of my familial and social circles, and I’d been the target of street harassment in other places. There are absences so profound that even knowledge of their absence is absent; there are things missing even from our lists of the missing. So it was with the voice with which I could have said No, I’m not interested, leave me alone, I realized only recently.
We often say silenced, which presumes someone attempted to speak. In my case, it wasn’t a silencing because no speech was stopped; it never started, or it had been stopped so far back I don’t remember how it happened. It never occurred to me to speak to the men who pressured me then, because it didn’t occur to me that I had the authority to assert myself thus or that they had any obligation or inclination to respect my assertions, or that my words would do anything but make things worse.
I became expert at fading and slipping and sneaking away, backing off, squirming out of tight situations, dodging unwanted hugs and kisses and hands, at taking up less and less space on the bus as yet another man spread into my seat, at gradually disengaging, or suddenly absenting myself. At the art of nonexistence, since existence was so perilous. It was a strategy hard to unlearn on those occasions when I wanted to approach someone directly. How do you walk right up to someone with an open heart and open arms amid decades of survival-by-evasion? All this menace made it difficult to stop and trust long enough to connect, but it made it difficult to keep moving too, and it seemed sometimes as though it was all meant to wall me up alone at home like a person prematurely in her coffin.
Walking was my freedom, my joy, my affordable transportation, my method of learning to understand places, my way of being in the world, my way of thinking through my life and my writing, my way of orienting myself. That it might be too unsafe to do was something I wasn’t willing to accept, though everyone else seemed more than willing to accept it on my behalf. Be a prisoner, they urged cheerfully; accept your immobility, wall yourself up like an anchorite! I was driven to go somewhere that was partly a metaphysical urge to make a life, to become and transform, to do, but literal travel expressed that passion and let off that pressure; I was never going to give up walking. It was a means of thinking, of discovering, of being myself, and to give it up would have meant giving up all those things.
One day when I was walking past a small park just east of the neighborhood, a passerby I’d never seen before spat full in my face without stopping. Even with other people around, I was alone: I was harassed more than once on the bus home while everyone pretended nothing was happening, perhaps because a man in a rage intimidated them too, perhaps because in those days people more often considered it none of their business or blamed the woman. Men would make proposals, demands, endeavor to strike up conversations and the endeavors quickly turned into fury. I knew of no way to say No, I’m not interested, that would not be inflammatory, and so there was nothing to say. There was no work words could do for me, and so I had no words.
Usually I’d look down, say nothing, avoid eye contact, do my best to be as absent, unobtrusive, insignificant as possible—invisible as well as inaudible—since I was afraid of that escalation. Even my eyes had to learn deferential limits. I erased myself as much as possible, because to be was to be a target. Those men conducted a conversation, sometimes a shouting match, with my silence. They shouted I owed them words, obedience, deference, sexual services. But the time I told off a man—a well-dressed white man—who was following me, in the same kind of profanity-laced language he was using to me, he was genuinely shocked and then threatened to kill me. It was daytime in a tourist district, so he probably wasn’t going to try, but it was a frightening reminder of what speaking up achieved.
It was as though their desire was overtaken by resentment or fury that the desire would not be satisfied, that the overtures would be rebuffed, and since they knew that in advance, the desire and rage emerged together in obscene, scornful propositions, in language that demonstrated their right to say those things and my helplessness to not suffer the insults. The rage: it was as though they expected me to obey strangers, as though any woman belonged to any man, as though everyone, anyone, owned me except me. The words: they had an overabundance, and I had none, even though I lived for and by words the rest of the time.
Even when I spoke to others, my words seemed useless. Late one night, a huge man whose muscles swelled his tracksuit followed me off a bus—not my usual bus line, but one that at that hour ran more frequently through another neighborhood and left me farther from home—and shadowed me on my several-block walk. Nearly home, I saw a uniformed security guard and asked him for help, thinking that after all this was his job. He turned more slowly than I did—and as he did, I saw the man following me step behind a fence—and said I was imagining things, and left. The stalker reappeared. I made i
t home.
Another night, after another late-night ride on the same bus line, I was mugged on the same street—surrounded by tall young men, one of whom pinned my arms down while I shouted at passing cars that did not stop, and while I imagined that all my worst fears were about to come to pass. I lost a whole satchel full of negatives and prints for a photojournalism class along with other schoolwork. The photography professor did not seem to believe me, and my grade suffered from the makeup work that was not as good as the work that was stolen. I was training to be a journalist, but my capacity to report was doubted. My words failed again. And again. After another attack, I told my boss—an elderly child psychiatrist—about it because I needed to explain why I wasn’t doing my job well that day, until I realized he was erotically excited by the attack. My friend who was almost murdered had faced the same kind of response from the men around her afterward.
I was often told that I was imagining things, or exaggerating, that I was not believable, and this lack of credibility, this distrust of my capacity to represent myself and interpret the world, was part of the erosion of the space in which I could exist and of my confidence in myself and the possibility that there was a place for me in the world and that I had something to say that might be heeded. When no one else seems to trust you, it’s hard to trust yourself, and if you do, you pit yourself against them all; either of those options can make you feel crazy and get called crazy. Not everyone has the backbone for it. When your body is not your own and the truth is not your own, what is?
I was twenty-one or twenty-two when I went to a New Year’s Eve party at the home of gay friends in suburban Marin County, the county of the Trailside Killer and that homicidal banker. My boyfriend at the time was running the lights for a concert, but was supposed to come and join me at midnight. He was delayed by his diligence, and I was sad that we were not celebrating the New Year together. I didn’t have a car in those days, I didn’t want to ask anyone for a ride, so I set out well after midnight to walk to my mother’s house about a mile away, where I could slip in and sleep on the couch without disturbing anyone. Perhaps she was away; that part I don’t remember, but what came before was indelible.
While I was on the main thoroughfare between the two houses, I realized that someone was behind me. I turned around: it was a big man with a shaggy beard and long hair. I walked faster. He was only a couple of feet behind me, not at a normal distance, and we were the only two people out on foot at that hour. It was dark, and the shrubs dividing the dark homes from each other loomed and streamed shadows, and his shadow and mine swelled and shrank from streetlight to streetlight, and cars passed by and their headlights made all the shadows swirl and lurch.
Once I had spotted him he began to speak, a low, steady stream telling me that he wasn’t following me, that I should not trust my own judgment, an accelerated course of gaslighting designed to undermine my ability to assess the situation and make decisions. He was very good at what he did, and his insinuating sentences were disorienting to the very young woman I was. Clearly, he had a lot of practice. I wondered later what harm he had done to other women before and after.
So much of what makes young women good targets is self-doubt and self-effacement. Now I would flag down cars, stand in the middle of the road, make noise, bang on doors, respect my own assessment of the threat, and take any action that seemed likely to get me out of it. I would bother someone, anyone. But I was young and trained not to make a fuss and to let others determine what was acceptable and even to determine what was real. It was many years later that I stopped letting men tell me what had and had not happened.
On that dark boulevard, I behaved as though it wasn’t happening, though I crossed the street to see if he was following me. He stuck to me like a curse. The walk seemed endless, though I was hoping to get to my destination before he attacked, thinking that if I didn’t disrupt the stalemate perhaps neither would he. Cars passed. Shadows swirled. I crossed the street again. He followed. Again. Again. Finally a few blocks before my destination, a man in a sedan pulled up and leaned over to open the passenger door and offered me a ride.
The stalker murmured from very close behind, “Don’t you know that getting into a stranger’s car is the most dangerous thing you can do?” Of course I had been told that over and over, and I hesitated.
Then I got in.
The driver said, “I passed you once and thought that it was none of my business. Then I thought it looked like a Hitchcock movie, so I came back.”
I’m grateful a man rescued me from a man. I wish I had not been in a Hitchcock movie where I needed rescue.
Though I was followed and yelled at and mugged and grabbed and more than once strangers threatened to kill me and men I knew menaced me a few times and others pursued me uncomfortably long after I’d tried to discourage them, I was not raped, though many friends of mine were, and all of us spent our youths navigating the threat, as do most women in most places. It gets you even if it doesn’t get you. All those years, I noticed the little stories tucked away on newspaper back pages, given a paragraph or two, mentioned in passing on broadcasts, about dismembered sex workers and murdered children and tortured young women and long-term captives, about wives and children slain by husbands and fathers, and the rest, each one treated as an isolated incident or at least something that was not part of any pattern worth naming. I connected the dots, saw an epidemic, talked and wrote about the patterns I saw, waited three decades for it to become a public conversation.
4
The threat of violence takes up residence in your mind. The fear and tension inhabit your body. Assailants make you think about them; they’ve invaded your thoughts. Even if none of these terrible things happen to you, the possibility they might and the constant reminders have an impact. I suspect some women push it down to some corner of their mind, make choices to minimize the reality of the danger so that it becomes an unseen subtraction of who they are and what they can do. Unspoken, unspeakable.
I knew what was lost. And the weight of it crushed me then, in those years when I was starting out, when I was trying to make a life, have a voice, find a place in the world. I did all those things, but I joked later that not getting raped was the most avid hobby of my youth. It took considerable vigilance and wariness and constantly prompted changed routes through cities, suburbs, wild places, through social groups, conversations, and relationships.
You can drip one drop of blood into a glass of clear water and it will still appear to be clear water, or two drops or six, but at some point it will not be clear, not be water. How much of this enters your consciousness before your consciousness is changed? What does it do to all the women who have a drop or a teaspoon or a river of blood in their thoughts? What if it’s one drop every day? What if you’re just waiting for clear water to turn red? What does it do to see people like you tortured? What vitality and tranquility or capacity to think about other things, let alone do them, is lost, and what would it feel like to have them back?
At the worst point, I would sleep with the lights and the radio on so it would seem as though I was still alert. (Mr. Young told me men had come by and asked which apartment I lived in, which of course he didn’t tell them, but it fed my nervousness.) I didn’t sleep well and still don’t. I was, as they say of traumatized people, hypervigilant and I was setting up my home to appear hypervigilant too. My flesh had turned to something brittle with tension. I used to look at the thick steel cables holding up the Golden Gate Bridge and think of the muscles in my neck and shoulders that felt as taut and as hard. I startled easily and flinched—cringed, really—when anyone made a sudden movement near me.
I tell all this not because I think my story is exceptional, but because it is ordinary; half the earth is paved over with women’s fear and pain, or rather with the denial of them, and until the stories that lie underneath see sunlight, this will not change. I tell this to note that we cannot imagine what an earth with
out this ordinary, ubiquitous damage would look like, but that I suspect it would be dazzlingly alive and that a joyous confidence now rare would be so common, and a weight would be taken off half the population that has made many other things more difficult to impossible.
I tell it too because when I wrote about all these things in general—in the objective voice of editorials and surveys of the scene—I didn’t represent enough of the way it harms you, or rather the way it harmed me. There’s a passage in Sohaila Abdulali’s book on surviving rape about a kind of voice—“a way of telling the story in a smooth arc; matter-of-factly, with intonation but no real emotion. . . . No matter how many details we share, we leave out the unbearable ones that nobody wants to hear.” In my book on walking I wrote, “It was the most devastating discovery of my life that I had no real right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness out of doors, that the world was full of strangers who seemed to hate me and wished to harm me for no reason other than my gender, that sex so readily became violence, and that hardly anyone else considered it a public issue rather than a private problem,” but that too didn’t quite plunge into what it was like inside my head.
Danger wracked my thoughts. Scenarios of attack would arise unbidden, and sometimes I addressed them by imagining winning the combat, usually by means of martial-arts moves I’m not really capable of, and so I killed in order not to be killed over and over during the grimmest years of that era, in imagined scenarios that were intrusive, unwanted, anxiety-driven, a kind of haunting and a way of trying to take control of being haunted. I realized then that making you think like a predator was one thing predators could do to you. Violence itself had penetrated me.
Recollections of My Nonexistence Page 5