Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl

by Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl (retail) (epub)

  ME: And so there was a line—

  HIM: That was apparently as far as I was willing to transgress on that particular night.

  NOT AN EASY THING FOR PEOPLE TO COUGH UP

  Every day the past week, I worry that I forgot to turn off the stove. To lock the door. Before I leave the house, I take my keys out of my bag, put them back in, and take them out—at least three times. As I do this, I notice my knuckles have started to bleed.

  How often are you washing your hands? Chris asks.

  Only as much as I need to, I say.

  Jung and I get drinks. She asks me, Are you looking out for yourself? It sounds like it could be emotionally difficult.

  I have a good therapist, I tell her.

  This morning I woke up to Mark, the figment of Mark, standing over me, like he was right there. I looked down. My clothes were on me. I looked up. Mark was gone.

  I arrange to meet with Adam twice a week.

  I tell Adam: I’m taking Mark at his word. He said he’s never done it again. And he was never a really social guy, and so I don’t think he’s put himself in the position to do it again. But if given the opportunity, would he do it again? I don’t know. Maybe he only did it once.

  I’ve talked to enough people, Adam says, where it’s usually not the case. I have people who feel very comfortable in here telling me about one thing that happened one time, and then two years later they’ll tell me about this other thing. It’s not an easy thing for people to cough up.

  So it’s not a one-off, right? Statistically.

  No.

  I know you’re not seeing him, so how can you guess or know. I just wonder. His psychology is such that he used to see what he could get away with. But he has been depressed, and so he doesn’t socialize.

  He may have sublimated his urges by getting sex workers, Adam says. When I picture him from your descriptions, I picture him very alone and reclusive and, in this day and age, probably finding ways to have sex with himself on the computer. I picture him in his living room just finding ways to—he doesn’t feel good after it—but finding ways not to do the wrong thing. But he definitely doesn’t feel right about it.

  . . .

  ME: What do you remember of the morning after?

  HIM: I remember I was kind of—when I’m really upset, basically what I do is kind of stew motionlessly, and I just get kind of deep in my own head. So I was doing that. And then Jake at some point had found out that something had happened. He came downstairs to check on me, to make sure I wasn’t—he was surprised. He wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to start throwing things and breaking things. Which I didn’t.

  ME: Is that what he said?

  HIM: That’s basically what he was concerned about. But yeah, I don’t really—I remember—I wish I remembered more. I think it was a couple of days—it wasn’t that day—it was a couple of days later by the time—probably you worked up the nerve to call me. I don’t think it was the other way around. I’m sure I didn’t.

  ME: I think I remember you calling me.

  HIM: Maybe I did.

  ME: I think you did. And I was surprised. I wasn’t expecting to hear from you again.

  HIM: Understandably. Well, maybe I did work up the nerve then. It was one of those things—I felt terrible about it immediately, but you can’t undo it.

  ME: When you called me, I remember feeling really conflicted and partly—

  HIM: I would have been mad at me.

  ME: What’s that?

  HIM: I feel like if that had happened to me and then I called you two days later or whatever then I probably wouldn’t have picked up the phone.

  ME: I think I felt sort of—I wouldn’t say happy. That’s not quite right. I remember thinking, Maybe we can stay friends. It can be okay.

  HIM: That’s classic you.

  ME: I’m like a dog. I just want everybody to like me.

  HIM: That’s such an unbelievably you reaction.

  WHICH JUST CONFIRMS I’M USING HIM

  Mark contradicted himself. In the first phone conversation, he said, I remember doing that, in reference to calling me after the assault. This time, he said, I’m sure I didn’t, in reference to that call. I rack my brain for a coherent interpretation. Maybe, in the first conversation, he felt desperate to claim credit for doing something decent, such as taking the initiative to apologize—and this time he’s careful not to take credit for a decent act that he potentially did not do.

  I want to tell the truth, but I don’t want to treat his answers as the absolute truth. The best I can figure: duplicity, intentional or not, is part of the human experience.

  I’m three days into spring break, and I haven’t left the house except to take out the recycling. In this time, I have suffered two nerdy injuries. The first: while standing on my toes to grab a novel from our topmost shelf, I knocked over a heavy bronze bookend and it fell onto my exposed shin. Blood ran down my shin and stained my new white sneakers. Well, just the right one. Now I can’t wear skirts because it looks like I don’t know how to shave my legs. The second injury: I stubbed my toe on my desk so badly that my toe started bleeding.

  I probably should leave the house, but I want to finish transcribing my second phone conversation with Mark. Sarah calls, asks when I talk to him next.

  I’m still working on part three, I tell her. Talking with him again, this soon, could screw up the section. Which just confirms that I’m using him.

  You have to include that, Sarah says. The fact that you’re using him belongs in there. Knowing that you’re so conflicted about it.

  I’m feeling less conflicted about it, I tell her.

  That’s what I want, she says, as a reader, for the character. I want her off of the circle of is he a good person, is he not a good person. I want him to become beside the point. I want him in the past. I want the narrator to reappropriate her own narrative. I want her to stop listening to him and recognize that in giving him so much voice, it’s a reenactment, in a way, of the rape. Where he talks more than she does.

  I want that too.

  . . .

  ME: I think part of the reason I stopped talking with you is my college boyfriend didn’t like the idea of my staying friends with you. He said, Jeannie, I can’t forgive him. But I said, It’s not for you to forgive. It happened to me. I was concerned if I stayed friends with you, or kept in touch with you, he would get mad and it’d ruin my relationship with him. I was just trying to make men happy. That was my life. So it’s really—I distinctly remember, I think I told you last time, when we all went out for wings and my college boyfriend didn’t want to go. Afterward, he said, I can’t believe you made me do that. I find his response interesting.

  HIM: It’s like, What right do you have to be angry—

  ME: Right. Which, I can understand it’s a natural reaction.

  HIM: Sure.

  ME: I think everyone was confused about the situation, but I thought I was less confused than everyone else about the assault. I think of the idea of performing one’s gender. It’s not disingenuous because within the larger structural system we’ve been assigned these roles to play.

  HIM: You feel it’s expected of you.

  ME: You feel it, or you’ve internalized it, and it often doesn’t feel like performance to you, but it’s also not completely genuine. I think I genuinely—I felt as if I’d genuinely forgiven you. I don’t even know if I thought I had to forgive you. But I felt I had forgiven you. I don’t know.

  HIM: This is where you can get really reductive really quickly.

  ME: Exactly. All I can say is how I remember feeling. And I did want our friendship to last, and honestly I think I was just having so many psychiatric problems that every relationship sort of died.

  HIM: And I was in a bad place for other reasons. This just kind of exacerbated—the shame was kind of the cherry on top of the depression sandwich. You know I was miserable for a lot of my twenties, and this was a part of why but it’s not the entire reason why.
I don’t want to give the impression that I’m blaming my rape of you for my own mental problems.

  I THOUGHT I WAS LESS CONFUSED

  I think everyone was confused about the situation, but I thought I was less confused than everyone else about the assault. I am so confused as to why I said that—seeing as how I didn’t think our friends were really thinking about the assault. My college boyfriend was. I knew that much, because he expressed confusion and anger about my apparent lack of anger. I never should have insisted he meet Mark.

  For my thirty-fourth birthday, Chris’s mom mails me a mood ring.

  This is so perfect, I tell Chris.

  And I didn’t even tell her, he says, that we’d been joking about this.

  I put it on. According to the ring, I’m mad.

  Two minutes later, I’m not.

  A minute later, I am.

  Now I’m not.

  My advisor put his hand between my legs while I wore clothes.

  Mark put his hand between my legs after he removed my clothes.

  My other friend pinned me down and raped me after he removed my clothes.

  I tell myself the progression is meaningless. Just a coincidence. I consult the ring. It’s yellowish. According to the color/mood chart, I feel either imaginative or unsettled mixed emotions. Is the ring questioning my memory, alleging that I’m imagining all of this? No, no, of course not. It’s reassuring me that my emotions are indeed unsettled and mixed.

  Now the ring is telling me I’m calm and relaxed. Either the ring is broken, or I’m broken. Or it’s a novelty item and I should stop investing so much energy in analyzing it.

  Like me the night of the assault, the ring has no agency.

  I wonder if Mark used me like a mood ring. Suddenly, he could see how angry he was. Angry about his virginity. So angry that he’d hurt one of his closest friends. It’d be easier to say that Mark wasn’t thinking about my feelings that night. But I had been crying about my dad’s death, crying about what my newspaper advisor had done to me. Mark, I’m sure, was thinking about my feelings. He selfishly used them to his advantage. I don’t care if I don’t have proof of his emotions that night.

  I take off the ring. I’m mad.

  . . .

  ME: It’s tricky. You’re in a tough rhetorical position. This is a hypothetical, but if you had a son, how would you—I’m not saying come up with a solution, but I guess what do you think leads to teenage boys forgetting impulse control and making decisions like this?

  HIM: I think part of it is unique to my own personal experience, but I think—let me see if I can come up with an answer here that makes any kind of rational sense. My family writ large does not communicate emotion well and my experience with it has been basically, Well, I’ll not talk about it and not talk about it and not talk about it and not deal with something until it just erupts and then it’s like a dam breaking and who knows what direction—who knows what collateral damage you’ll get. So I think if I had a son, I would try to get him to be more open than I was, or am, and deal with his feelings and emotions directly. But I also don’t plan on having children.

  ME: Boys are often taught to suck it up and be a man, and I think of how damaging that has been for everyone involved. Do you also think—I mean, you and I were such good friends. Did any part of you feel like, I’ve been there for her so much, this was—

  HIM: Well, I think what you’re trying to ask me is did I think I deserved some sort of sexual accommodation, which, I don’t really think so. I think definitely I wanted to figure out a way to move our relationship to an actual relationship and not just a friendship, but—

  ME: You weren’t sure how to express that.

  HIM: Right. Because I couldn’t even say, certainly at the time I couldn’t even express, that I did like you in that way, let alone—I’m still not good at talking about it.

  ME: It’s hard to talk about. I’m asking you questions like, What sort of pornography did you watch in high school? and Did any of it portray nonconsensual sex? It’s okay.

  HIM: I’ll admit to having been a little caught off guard by that, but it’s not an unreasonable place to start.

  ME: But you think a lot of it goes back to: you didn’t know how to express how you felt.

  HOW MUCH MORE COULD YOU DO FOR HIM?

  I’m mad at what Mark did, yet I want him to be okay. It’s hard to feel contempt when for five years he was one of my closest friends.

  Is there a possibility, Adam asks, that your project could be the very thing that would lead him to help?

  Possibly, I say. A lot of my friends are surprised that he’s agreed to talk. So maybe this is the first step.

  I know I have the tendency to be a little protective of you, Adam says, but how much more could you do for him? This venue is a springboard for getting help. He’s probably talked about this more in the past two months than he ever has. If he’s ever talked about it at all. If things get kicked up, if he starts having bad dreams or intrusive thoughts, maybe he’ll feel motivated to seek out help.

  Maybe, I tell Adam. I hope.

  I tell Sarah what Adam said.

  Why is he engaging with you on this level of how to help Mark? she asks. Why isn’t he guiding you to talk about your own experience?

  He is, I tell her. I’m cherry-picking one conversation. But Adam is helping. It’s just, I’ve been obsessing over whether I should help Mark find a therapist. Adam was responding to that.

  You’re not going to, are you?

  No, no. I mean, he should do that. But therapy is expensive. I was just thinking I could find a sliding-scale therapist for him.

  Stop worrying about him, she tells me.

  My friend Tom calls, asks how this project is going.

  It’s okay, I tell him. Actually, it’s not. I feel like I’ll disappoint my friends—and women in general—by including so much of Mark’s voice.

  You’re not going to please everybody, Tom says. And that’s a good thing.

  I wish I could think like that, I tell him.

  A former war reporter, Tom now lives in Istanbul. Some years ago, masked men with Kalashnikovs captured him and other journalists in Aleppo. For reasons Tom still doesn’t understand, his captors apologized, gave him and his colleagues lunch, bought them drinks at a roadside espresso stand, and released them hours later.

  I ask him what he’s working on, and he says he’s compiling an oral history of ISIS.

  You’re interviewing ISIS? I say.

  Through a network of Syrian fixers.

  Wow, I say. That has got to be hard.

  Yeah, he says. They’ve executed friends of mine. I don’t agree with ISIS at all. But in order to fix a problem, you have to understand the enemy. What’s interesting is not all of them execute people. Some are electricians responsible for keeping the grid on. Others distribute food and water to the locals. It’s scary how nice some of these guys can seem. That’s what makes it so insidious.

  Okay, I tell him. I feel so much better about my project.

  ISIS and sexual abusers, Tom says. You might be in a slightly better position.

  . . .

  HIM: This is in one of the email drafts I deleted, but I distinctly remember telling myself—when I was in grade school probably—not to have emotions because that way the other kids in my class couldn’t use them to hurt me, which is not really a productive way to go through life.

  ME: Do you think you forgot that others have strong emotions?

  HIM: It wasn’t like I thought other people shouldn’t have emotions. I didn’t want to give anybody else anything that they could grab on to and use to hurt me.

  ME: What were some of the thoughts that you had, or that you can recall having, that night? Either before or during or immediately after? I know you said you remember me crying. Do you remember what sort of thoughts were going through your mind?

  HIM: I remember knowing that I shouldn’t be doing this and doing it anyway. And then I remember you started to
cry and then I lay down. There was a little gap where I lay down, and then I remember thinking maybe you were so drunk you wouldn’t remember it, or that it was bad and then maybe it would be okay, and then you did start to cry and I remember you whispering, He raped me. And I realized that it wasn’t going to be okay. And then it’s just however many hours of just me realizing what I had just done and that it wasn’t going to be okay.

  ME: It’s strange to hear that I used that word, rape, considering how I didn’t think of it as rape at the time, or said I didn’t think of it as rape. Did I just whisper that to no one?

  HIM: Yeah, just, under your breath. I remember you were crying and said that. And yeah, it’s tough really to think about.

  SO WHY DO I STILL FEEL UNCOMFORTABLE?

  Immediately after the assault happened, there, in the basement, with no one listening except for Mark, I whispered: He raped me. I don’t remember this, but I believe Mark’s memory. So why do I still feel uncomfortable using the word rape?

  Mark is still him, regardless of what I call him.

  And as for what he did—

  Regardless of what I call it, his actions remain the same.

  . . .

  ME: Do you—have you thought about getting a therapist? Since we’ve started talking especially?

  HIM: Have I thought about it? Sure. Am I at all likely to take the sort of action that leads to doing that? No.

  ME: It’s hard to find a good therapist.

  HIM: It is, and like, I don’t—like I said earlier, I could probably use somebody that’s not you to talk about some of this stuff with, but my process is just more to not talk about it.

  ME: Are you close friends with the guys you work with?

  HIM: I was pretty good friends with a couple of the guys, but we’ve had some turnover. It’s a really small business. It’s mostly me and Sam. I like Sam fine and we get along, but he’s five years older and has a wife and three little girls. We don’t hang out.

  ME: So who do you spend time with, then?

  HIM: I sort of don’t. I don’t want to make myself out to be too much of a sad sack, but I really don’t have a lot of close friends. I’m just bad at maintaining those relationships or starting new ones. It is sort of what it is.