by Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl (retail) (epub)
You’re such a nerd, he said.
Or take the school stoner. He filmed me and a few other girls modeling in my friend Sheanneen’s fashion show. Sheanneen designed and made the clothes herself. Because of a skirt’s thin material, I’d taken her suggestion and worn a thong. I later learned that the school stoner had aimed the camera up my skirt. He and one of his friends made copies of the tape and distributed them. I didn’t know how many copies.
Mark said, People are the worst.
I don’t understand, I told him. They have access to porn. This was just me, and I was wearing underwear.
Mark explained, There’s something about it being someone you know.
I remind myself, Focus on the good. I want readers to like Mark, to see why I trusted Mark, to think, Of course Jeannie wouldn’t have expected him to assault her. That way, his betrayal will seem as unthinkable and unexplainable as it seemed to me then—because, while I know it’s not my fault, some part of me still blames myself for trusting him.
But if Mark comes across as too nice, I could come across as too defensive of him, delusional even. Yet Mark was nice, and that’s why his voice belongs here. I want readers to meet one of these guys, to think, I’m probably friends with one of these guys without realizing it. Also, I don’t want readers to focus so much on me that they think about what I could have done differently to prevent or stop the assault. I want readers to hear Mark say, I knew what I was doing was abhorrent. And Mark better. He better feel so terrible that he admits, I preyed on your vulnerability. Otherwise, this project, founded on my belief that Mark was my friend, falls apart.
Mark and I talked about our feelings, and he actually would follow up the next time we hung out. What other guy his age did that?
Mark and I often sat with our friends Daniel, Garrett, and Carlos at lunch, quoting lines from Office Space and The Simpsons.
I said, Someone say something that isn’t a quote.
We all looked at one another. No one knew what to say.
Garrett: Marge, we need some more vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry ice cream.
We could all picture Homer Simpson staring into a box of Neapolitan ice cream—with only the chocolate missing.
We are so unoriginal, you guys, I said.
So we just laughed at our unoriginality.
Daniel, Garrett, and Carlos are not their real names. To protect Mark’s identity, I’ll change some names and mention when I do it. I don’t know how else to simultaneously protect Mark and tell the truth. That I care about protecting him at all, it bothers me.
Daniel invited Mark, Garrett, Carlos, and me to a LAN party at his house.
A what? my dad asked.
Local area network party, I explained. We hook up our computers on the same network and play computer games.
He nodded, an indication of approval.
The LAN party is all night, I said and named off all the boys who’d be there.
Okay, he said.
Daniel’s parents will be there, I added.
It’s fine, he said. Have fun.
Before I left, I asked my mom: Dad is letting me stay out all night with boys?
You are bringing your computer, she said.
In grade school, my dad didn’t let me sleep over at a girl’s house unless he knew and trusted her parents. He had never met Daniel’s parents. He had never even met Daniel.
And so, before my dad could change his mind, I hurriedly packed my computer tower and clunky Trinitron monitor into my LeBaron’s trunk and drove to Mark’s house to pick him up. Mark placed his desktop computer, wrapped in a towel, next to mine in the trunk.
Your tower is impressive, he said.
I had cut an abstract shape in its side (adding black rubber liner, the sort used for car windows, to hide my uneven cuts), mounted interior neon lights, inserted a Plexiglas window, and installed a small fan. I also had painted the tower bright blue with a white racing stripe. And I could take it all apart and reassemble its insides, identify where the CPU connected to the main memory. At the LAN party, this impressed the guys.
You think I’d buy an already modded tower? I asked.
I tried not to smile when they said, You’re not like the other girls.
I described these LAN parties in a college admissions essay. I clarified that one would put quotes around party the same way one might allege a strip club was for gentlemen. I went to the LAN parties, I explained in the essay, not because I enjoyed playing Quake and Counter-Strike but because we discussed politics and religion. I could criticize our country’s involvement in proxy wars, and the guys would listen. I remember we complained a lot about our conservative government teacher. The day after 9/11, he told our class, We should bomb the snot out of Afghanistan and France and anyone else that gets in our way.
But here’s what I didn’t mention in my admissions essay: at one LAN party, Daniel repeated some rumor that our government teacher’s daughter went to orgies, and I asked, Even if that’s true, why does it matter?
He said it proved our teacher, who claimed liberals lacked family values, was a hypocrite.
Not really, I replied. It just proves that she’s her own person.
From kindergarten through junior high, I attended a school where Jesus was on a cross, dying in every classroom. Before raising my hand, I regularly questioned whether I should—all because of one classroom banner that read: The meek shall inherit the Earth.
Until I transferred to public school in the ninth grade, almost everybody I knew believed in God. I liked that Mark was a good person who didn’t believe in God. Atheism seemed glamorous.
You’re not one of these hypocrites hankering for eternity, I told him.
I like that, he said.
You don’t think the alliteration is too purple? Or maybe it’s a bluish purple?
You overthink everything.
Which is probably, I said, why we’re friends.
I remember eating leftover Halloween candy with Mark and complaining about a hell house that two classmates had just duped me into visiting.
You went to a hell house? Mark asked.
I thought I was going to a regular haunted house. Chain saws and zombies, you know? I didn’t know it’d be a Christian thing. It was in a forest.
He laughed, and I described the teenage boys dressed as doctors staging abortions gone wrong. I described the teenage girls in a busted-up car with ketchup smeared all over them and beer bottles on their laps. I described the hot guy dressed as Jesus.
But what bugged me the most, I said, was the last scene.
At the forest’s edge, near the gravel parking lot, had stood a white door connected to nothing. On the other side of the door, we’d been told, waited heaven. We were supposed to tell a church counselor why we deserved to walk through the door and into heaven. Somebody whispered that the door was on loan from a hardware shop that belonged to a cheerleader’s dad.
Why that mattered, I said to Mark, I have no idea.
When asked why I deserved to walk through the door, I struggled not to roll my eyes. I answered that I tried to be a good person. The counselor instructed me to wait off to the side. I pushed past him and walked into heaven anyway.
But I should have asked for directions to Jesus, I told Mark. I definitely wanted to make out with Jesus.
Mark looked away. I almost teased him: Are you jealous of Jesus?
One night, Mark, a few friends, and I drove to a forest on the town outskirts where an orphanage was rumored to have burned down.
I don’t believe in ghosts, I said.
Me neither, he said.
We both jumped at the sound of twigs breaking, then laughed at ourselves.
You’re really pretty, he told me that night.
I pretended not to hear.
He confided that he hated being lazy: Things have always come easy to me.
I MIGHT STOP FEELING ASHAMED
Reading about the legal considerations for memoirists, I almost la
ugh at the suggestion of securing consent.
I should ask him?
My partner, my friends, my therapist, they can suggest why Mark assaulted me. But their conjectures might diminish the urgency I feel about this project. They might transform the particulars of what happened into some stock instance of an already accepted theory in sociology or psychology or whatever. I want Mark’s why.
Had he been sober, would he have restrained himself?
How can I expect him to be honest about that?
Or even to know the answer?
I’m thirty-three years old, an assistant professor at a university outside Baltimore. I tell my creative nonfiction students not to ask for consent from anyone mentioned in their essays.
Wait, I tell my students, until you’ve settled into your writing.
But let’s say Mark grants consent and honestly answers all my questions. He undoubtedly will want his identity obscured. But if I blur it, I fictionalize—and so in my efforts to protect him, do I discredit myself?
This question, though—why include him?—interests me more than any question I could ask him—because it leads to an uncomfortable thought: My story isn’t interesting without him.
As a feminist and an artist, I’m ashamed that his voice seems necessary. I teach college students how to explore their stories artfully. I’d never tell a student that her personal essay about sexual assault would be more interesting with the perpetrator’s perspective. Until now, I hadn’t considered that point of view. And every semester I read at least five student essays about rape. These students are always women, and these women often ask some variation of: What counts as sexual assault?
Sometimes they ask me if they’ve been raped.
Sometimes, knowing the answer, they make excuses for the man: he was drunk, he was sad, he had low confidence.
Their rapists are never strangers in the bushes or alleys. Their rapists are their friends, their boyfriends, their boyfriends’ friends, their bosses, their relatives, their teachers.
Their excuses frustrate me, but I understand.
Here I am, trying to render the Mark I knew before that night.
When Mark knew me, I edited the high school newspaper, then majored in journalism on full scholarship at Northwestern, and then interned for a business reporter at the New York Times Chicago bureau, where I researched cube-shaped Japanese watermelons and Europe’s stance on genetically altered crops. I desperately wanted to become a journalist—and whenever I doubted my abilities, Mark would remind me that I’d earned a full ride to a top journalism school.
But one month after I started college, my dad died—and I became increasingly obsessed with a deathbed promise: that someday I’d write a book for him. He was under so much morphine I doubt he even heard me. But by junior year, my promise led me to switch majors, from journalism to creative writing. I’d either write a novel for him, or I’d write him a book of poetry. Memoirs, I assumed, belonged to celebrities and politicians. But then, fifteen years after he died, I published a memoir for him, about him, about my love for him. This genre felt right. I wanted readers to know: the man you’re reading about, he was real and I loved him. He was sixty-one and retired when I was born, but throughout my childhood he didn’t seem old, not to me. We’d spend entire days together, swimming, riding bikes, feeding birds by the lake. Not until I became a teenager did I notice his worsening health. He was bedridden the last year of his life. Doctors said there were so many things wrong with him. His death certificate lists throat cancer. While I never expected my first book to diminish my grief, I think it did. I rarely dream about him anymore, and I’m okay with that. Maybe this book will end my nightmares about Mark.
But that’s not why I’m writing this.
I’m writing this because I want to interview Mark, interrogate Mark, confirm that Mark feels terrible—because if he does feel terrible, then our friendship mattered to him. Also, I want him to call the assault significant—because if he does, I might stop feeling ashamed about the occasional flashbacks and nightmares. Sometimes I question whether my feelings are too big for the crime. I often remind myself, He only used his fingers. Sure, I could censor my antiquated, patriarchal logic (sexual assault only matters if the man says it matters), but I want to be honest here—because I doubt I’m the only woman sexually assaulted by a friend and confused about her feelings.
THE UNDERLYING QUESTION
When I tell my partner, Chris, about this project, he’s sautéing fresh broccoli and garlic in a stainless steel pan and baking breaded tofu. Usually, when I fix dinner, I empty a bag of frozen vegetables, a can of beans, and a jar of salsa into our nonstick IKEA wok. Chris and I met briefly—as in, for less than five minutes on a sidewalk—at Northwestern, where he also studied creative writing, and then he graduated a month later. Having heard he was a talented poet, I searched online for his poems, found nothing, and then forgot about him. I didn’t know that he’d also searched for mine. We wouldn’t meet again until a few years later, when we both lived in New York. He came to a party for the magazine where I worked. Not realizing he was there to see me, I introduced him to some other guests and went off to mingle. And two or three months later, Chris came to another party to see me; this time, I introduced him to one of my interns, and I left with someone else. Why didn’t you just tell me? I asked Chris on our first date—as if asking somebody out is so easy. We’ve been together eight years now.
It’s an interesting idea, he says of the project.
Does it bother you? The idea of me talking to him, I mean.
I don’t like the guy, obviously, but it’s a good angle.
I don’t think the book will work if I can’t get him to talk. You think he’ll agree?
Based on what you’ve told me about him, Chris says, I think so.
Is it bad that I sort of look forward to talking to him?
You were friends.
I remember a night on the lakefront. Mark, a few friends, and I sneaked onto someone’s private patch of beach in a rich neighborhood near the local amusement park. The stars were out. I complained about some TV commercial advertising stars. For fifty dollars, you could name a star after someone.
Buying stars is so American, I said.
Considering how much you just love capitalism, Mark said, I find it amusing that you were voted Most Likely to Show Up on a Presidential Ballot.
I came in second, I corrected him.
I then confided my disappointment: our classmates voted me Most Involved, but I placed third for Most Likely to Succeed.
You’ll succeed, he said. Also, you did win Best Hair.
But I don’t care about Best Hair, I lied.
Admittedly, I feel defensive and insecure about forgiving Mark. That’s another reason why I’m lingering on good memories.
Though I’m trying to determine if I ever genuinely forgave him.
I email the opening pages to a close friend from grad school—I’ll call her Sarah. She also studied memoir, and we sometimes swap work. Her feedback focuses on the Let’s just assume it was a blackboard line.
That actually feels huge to me, she writes. It’s intensely resonant and important. Seems too easily won for such a major point—and one that really seems to be the underlying question of the project: Who gets to tell which story by what authority and with what significance and effect?
Sarah is right. Interviewing Mark, I risk giving him too much authority, allowing him, inviting him to shape the narrative. But by interviewing him, I also can invert the power dynamic. By attempting to answer why he assaulted me, he’ll probably come across as too defensive. And maybe I want that. Maybe I want to hurt him, just a little. When I told him that I forgave him, or implied I forgave him, maybe I was attempting to feel superior. I worry that’s motivating me now.
Lately I’ve been consulting philosophy texts, trying to figure out my motivations behind this project and the ethics of it all.
Foucault smartly argued: The agency of dominat
ion does not reside in the one who speaks (for it is he who is constrained), but in the one who listens and says nothing.
But Foucault stupidly suggested: When one punishes rape one should be punishing physical violence and nothing but that.
And why am I quoting Foucault? To prove I’m rational and intelligent? (I’ve never read an entire book by Foucault.) To prove I’m not some hysterical, overly emotional woman? Before getting too many pages in, I should acknowledge that I’ve been hospitalized (seven or so times) for psychosis. To some people, my diagnosis of bipolar disorder brands me an unreliable narrator. Multiple readers of my writing have asked me about any number of memories described: Are you sure what happened happened? Are you sure you weren’t hallucinating?
And that’s another reason why I want Mark to confirm what happened.
But who’s to say he’s reliable?
We were both pretty drunk, he reminded me during his (supposed) apology, implying that I shared some of the blame, as if I should have known not to get drunk at a party attended exclusively by friends. And I did blame myself—which, I know now, was illogical, just as blaming myself for my dad’s death was illogical. I used to believe that he’d have lived longer had I not left for college. But he died at eighty. He’d had health problems for years. Still, not until I finished my first book did the blame lift.
But why should I have blamed myself for what Mark did? I was drunk—drunk for the first time—and alone with him in his basement room. Had I screamed, I doubt anyone at the party could have heard me underneath the music. Him undressing me, putting his fingers in my vagina, masturbating over me. If I’d resisted or fought back, what else would he have done? Fear can freeze us. Instead of simply fight or flight, some psychologists add freeze to the familiar term. And the FBI nixed forcibly from its definition of rape, understanding that sometimes a victim’s best option is to stay very still.
Mark assaulted me in 2003. Back then, according to the FBI’s definition of rape (the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will), Mark hadn’t raped me.