by Bobi Conn
I met Jacob when I was married to James, when James and I decided to go stay in a holler where a group of Rainbow hippies lived in their hand-built cabins. Jacob lived in a teepee on the property of a mutual friend. I hugged him when I met him sitting outside our friend’s cabin. Had the hug lasted too long? James and I didn’t end up staying in our tent out there for very long, and I didn’t see Jacob again until after James and I split up for good.
One day, I drove toward my apartment and saw him sitting outside the public library with my dreadlocked friend who had lived with me a couple of times by that point. I pulled over in a hurry, ostensibly to say hello to my friend, and invited them both over for dinner—I had always thought Jacob was cute. We spent that night together, and then most others after that.
That first night, though, he found a used condom on the floor of my bedroom that I somehow had missed. And I had to tell him the whole story.
A few weeks prior to that, I had met a new guy, Wes, who was kicking a Hacky Sack on campus, though he wasn’t a student. He had nice eyes and a gentle voice, and I invited him to a party. I had played my favorite records for him at my apartment, and he came over to my house and brought me a record that he bought from one of my favorite antique stores in town.
We didn’t use a condom the first time we had sex, and he insisted later that I get tested and show him the results because, he said, I must have been lying when the nurse told me over the phone they were negative. Wes eventually apologized, and I invited him to come to another party with me. That night, two guys at the party latched onto me, though I was surrounded by friends. Why did they choose me? I was surprised at the time—I didn’t try to flirt and didn’t get drunk. There’s a quality some people see in the vulnerable, a marker that’s recognized only by the kind of people who want to prey on them. One had dreadlocks and a hippie nickname and knew several of my friends. The other was a friend of his, visiting from Colorado. They wanted my number, in case you want to hang out later, and I gave it to them, confused. When I left with Wes, they asked whether I wanted them to stop by, and I said I didn’t think so.
When we got back to my apartment, they called and asked whether I wanted them to come over. No, I said. We’re going to bed.
Wes wanted to know why I gave them my number in the first place, and I told him I didn’t know. And I didn’t—I didn’t know why they wanted it, didn’t know why they called, and didn’t know anything other than I wanted him to hold me and be sweet to me and to fall asleep in my bed.
But he put his coat on and stood in the kitchen while I sat at the table, once again ashamed for whatever had led me to fail again so quickly. I didn’t realize you were so sexual, he said. It didn’t matter that I had told them not to come over.
We heard someone come up the stairs. There was a knock at the door, and he opened it. It was the dreadlocks guy. Do you all want to hang out? he asked. No! I said, this time not trying to hide my frustration. He said okay and quickly bounded back down the stairs.
Wes looked at me and told me that the dreadlocks guy left only because he was there and that the other guy was intimidated by him.
Good, I said. Please don’t go.
But he left, and it was clear that he thought me a whore.
The doorknob lock was broken where James had tried to let himself in a few weeks before that. He had tried to persuade me to share my student grant money with him, since he thought I was receiving it due to us still being married. He stood over me, with what I sensed as a hint of threat in his voice, until I told him I would give him several hundred dollars. Which I did, once I received my financial aid.
After Wes walked out, I put the chain lock on the door, turned off the lights, and crawled into bed, crying into my pillow. Suddenly, someone pushed open my door until the chain caught. It was the guys from the party.
We just wanted to see whether you needed some company.
No, I said. I’m going to sleep. But they held the door open as far as the chain would allow.
Let us in, and we’ll keep you company.
I didn’t know what to do, so I grabbed my clothes off the floor and turned on the light. I opened the door, tears still rolling down my face.
What happened? they asked, so concerned.
I told them, expressing my confusion and how hurt I was, and they started massaging my shoulders and arms. They were big men, fit and strong. The one from Colorado was an outdoorsman, he said. They were older than me, and if I had met them under different circumstances, I’m sure I would have thought they were cool guys. One of them started to take my shirt off, and I pulled it back down. But then he tried again, and the other went for my shorts. It was then that I realized there were two strange men in my house, and though I kept saying, No, please, they weren’t stopping. They moved me onto the floor and took their clothes off.
No, please, I said, but they weren’t the kind of men who would acknowledge the word stop.
A day or two later, I told my friend who had held the party about what happened. What the fuck, they were giving Lindsey a ride home. She was in the van downstairs while they did that. It turned out our mutual friend had fallen asleep and didn’t know they stopped at my house.
They waited for my date to leave. They had seen Wes standing in his coat, and they pretended to go. They sat in their van and watched him walk away. Did he see them, too? When later demanding to know what happened that night, he claimed that he didn’t. He had heard that something happened and came to my house to ask me if it was true. I knew what he would say. There would be no sympathy for me. So I simply told him, It wasn’t as bad as it could have been.
I did think Jacob would have some sympathy when I recounted the story for him so he would know why I had failed to pick up a condom that one of the men had apparently tossed aside before each of them said, I’ll be right back, walked downstairs, and never returned. Jacob was a feminist, and he had told me about his favorite porn star, who was all about female sexuality and being empowered. He had told me all about his last girlfriend, too. She turned out to be a young runaway, and they traveled around doing Food Not Bombs activist work, living under bridges, until he decided to move back to his parents’ house next to the golf course.
It shook me to hear he had dated someone who was underage. I knew he would be angry if I questioned him, so I tucked away my concerns, telling myself there was probably something wrong with my judgment—like I always did when a man’s behavior made me uncomfortable. Looking back, I wish I had known that the too-young girlfriend might be a sign of how much he liked to have authority, a certain kind of power that is easy to claim when one person has so much more experience than the other. A runaway, at that—someone who had no security or stability to turn to. I didn’t know that I wasn’t too terribly different from her in some ways.
After I finished telling him my story, he asked, Why did you let them in?
I felt my stomach sink.
Why didn’t you kick them in the balls? He was angry. I didn’t even know what to say.
I had gotten out condoms, thinking it quite likely that these guys were disease ridden and that if they wouldn’t stop when I said please, no, and if watching me cry the whole time wasn’t a turnoff, at least I could try to keep them from impregnating or infecting me. I knew my physical odds of escape should they have decided to restrain me or punish me. I weighed about ninety-five pounds and had never kicked anyone in the balls or slapped anyone. I had never escaped any violence. I made the choice to submit, the impossible choice that garners no sympathy.
And there was none. I couldn’t bring myself to tell my professors why I was suddenly late all the time and that I was afraid to leave my apartment. My mentor let me go from my teaching-assistant position at the end of the fall, and when I asked whether I could work for him in the spring semester, he just said, No—no explanation given, none really needed. I had stopped working hard and setting a good example for the students in his classes. I didn’t know how to tell him wh
at had happened, why I changed. How I was nervous to walk down the street now, and how every man with a shaved head looked like one of the men from that night, and I was full of anger and fear around any man with that appearance—especially the one in my professor’s class. When Jacob wanted me again, he eventually let it go. A couple of women asked me whether I would call the police, and I said no, knowing what justice looks like for women like me, poor women with crazy fathers who grow up in hollers.
CHAPTER 27
The Gift
I had been vegan for a little over two years when I met Jacob, but he told me I was being ridiculous, so I began eating fish soon after he started staying with me. One evening, I asked whether he wanted to go out to eat—one of his favorite things to do. But that night, he accused me of trying to spend all his grandfather’s money—the inheritance that he had partially lived on while in his teepee out in the woods and now used while unofficially living at my apartment. He had insisted on buying a VCR so we could watch movies together—I had only watched The Simpsons on my friend’s small TV that she left in the apartment. He had offered to help pay utilities and my rent, but I told him no, I wanted this place to be my own, and he was my guest. Still, he recounted how many thousands of dollars he had somehow spent because of me.
Soon after we got together, Jacob told me how obnoxious I was when I was drinking, particularly when I had three beers on a New Year’s Eve. Jacob said he used to drink too much, so he stopped drinking before I met him. I had sat on another guy’s lap that night—I thought of him as a brother, but that probably doesn’t work for many men at all. Jacob said his problem was not with me sitting on the guy’s lap, but with how drunk I was. So out of control. So I stopped drinking beer with my friends.
Jacob hadn’t finished college. He started at a private college, one of the most highly acclaimed private colleges in the South. Then he went to a state university and dropped out of that one as well. Jacob thought all my effort toward college was ridiculous.
I had friends who worked at the local coffee shop, and I would go there between classes, or sometimes after class, and socialize and occasionally get free or discounted drinks. Jacob thought my friends at the coffee shop were ridiculous, too.
Before a year had passed, he decided to buy land in an adjacent county and told me that if I didn’t move down there with him, we wouldn’t see each other or be able to stay together. So I moved down to his property in Rockcastle County, which we didn’t yet know was actually 213 acres, since the deed said 75 acres, more or less. It was just about an entire holler. There were two waterfalls on the property and fallow fields all over. An unfinished house sat next to a queenly maple tree, and we lived in that house, sharing the space sometimes with rats and other times with snakes. A black snake lived in the maple tree, a copperhead in the compost pile at the corner of the porch. One black snake lived in the addition to the house, even less finished than the house itself, which boasted a painted chipboard subfloor and a pink insulation board ceiling. Little holes in the subfloor were scattered here and there, allowing you to see the ground below.
The house had been built in the passive-solar style, allowing heat to come in through the south-facing windows, especially in the wintertime, but the windows were too large and too many—the south-facing wall was made of much more glass than it should have been, so the house heated up far too much and lost too much heat in the winter. The summer was just hot, all around.
There were two lofts, one with stairs so rickety that I stopped going up them once I was a few months pregnant. The bathroom had a sink and a white enameled bathtub. A water hose ran from the plastic water tank outside to the sink, allowing us to turn on the water just about anytime. The house came with a woodstove that got way too hot sometimes, and that’s where we heated water for baths or washing dishes, until a friend from another eastern-Kentucky holler insisted on giving us a gas hot plate to use for the summer. We moved into the house in a chilly spring but still didn’t have wood cut for the fall and winter, so when it got cold, neighbors sold or gave us wood sometimes, and my dad brought loads down a couple of times, too—mostly pine, which filled the pipe with creosote and smoked up the house, or half-rotten wood that also filled the house with smoke. I would learn how to make a fire out of damn near anything after my son was born.
The road was almost impassable without four-wheel drive, but some folks tried anyway. Several vehicles were ruined by the bouncing, and the road itself was as much chunks of conglomerate rock as it was dirt and gravel. You had to know where to put your tires, and due to rain or snow, that kept changing. For a while, I still had my little Volkswagen Fox, the first car I bought by myself, with a standard transmission. It couldn’t make the trip down into the holler, so I had to park it at the top of the mile-long driveway and walk down to the house.
I didn’t know it when Jacob bought the house, but the couple who sold it to him did so in part because one of the rednecks who lived around there told the husband he had seen the wife naked through his gun scope one day, so the wife was no longer willing to live there. During my pregnancy, that redneck and several others would periodically ride their four-wheelers through our property, sometimes when I was alone, and I would wonder whether I could fight them off with nothing but the ax I kept next to the futon mattress on the floor while I slept.
There was electric at the barn, so Granny gave me a minifridge to keep food there after the big refrigerator that came with the farm died. She told me not to lift it, but I was stubborn and unloaded it anyway, alone in that empty holler after I drove it back. There was a solar-electric system at the house, but it wasn’t set up well, or the batteries were too old or had gotten too cold—I never really understood why it wouldn’t work. We couldn’t have more than one thing on at a time, so if you wanted to listen to the radio during the summer, you had to turn the fan off. And at night, if you wanted to use a lamp, you couldn’t have the fan or the television on.
Rainwater fell from the roof into a gutter and then into the plastic water-storage tank. Sometimes the water turned green, so we added bleach to it and went on with our bathing and teeth brushing. We carried water from the spring in five-gallon jugs, even after we found a six-inch parasitic worm whipping about in one of the jugs we drank from when I was just a month or two pregnant.
When I was fifteen, I started thinking I wouldn’t live past the age of nineteen—at the time, nineteen seemed like an old age, and I thought I would be through with all this living by that time. I spent a lot of time with my new little brother, who was about two years old when I moved away from Morehead. My dad had married a woman just eight years older than me, and he started over as a father. I hoped that, somehow, he would be gentler with the younger kids than he was with Junior and me. Two-year-old William would spend the night with me, sometimes up to a week at a time. People thought he was my child, and though I loved him and changed his diapers and it felt right to take care of him, I was horrified at the idea of being a mother.
By the time I was seventeen, I told my family I would never have children of my own. I did not want the responsibility of having a child, but I also thought I was incapable of loving someone enough to be a mother. In my young wisdom, I thought that the universe, or God, or anyone else who might have a say in the matter, would not allow me to get pregnant, that I was as good as barren.
So when my period was late for the first time, I thought it was because I had abandoned my vegan diet, and the dairy I was consuming had somehow altered my hormones. I thought that my body was readjusting to the new food, even though I only consumed dairy from cows who didn’t receive extra hormones. When I mentioned my theory to a friend, she looked at me with raised eyebrows and asked whether I could be pregnant. I had always been so convinced that I couldn’t be a mother, the thought had truly never occurred to me, though I was not on birth control.
Jacob and I went to a Rite Aid in Lexington and got a pregnancy test. As soon as the results showed up positive, he said I
needed to decide whether to keep it or not, which I thought was surprising because, although I had debated about abortion in my philosophy classes, I knew it to be a thing good girls don’t do. We drove to the Henry Clay Estate and sat on a bench in the garden, surrounded by hedges and looking out at an array of rosebushes. It was beautiful, unlike anything I had ever seen. We talked, and with little thought, I decided I wanted to have the baby.
We had to get married, Jacob said. His family was Catholic and would consider our child a bastard if I didn’t marry him. They were true southerners, with the accents and money and not-sweet corn bread to prove it. They approved of me somewhat because I had gotten into a good college with no help from my family. I decided to marry him even though I had told him, when we started dating, that I didn’t want to get remarried anytime soon. When I was little, one of my aunts had read my palm and told me I would be married and divorced three times. I was determined never to let that happen, since three failed marriages sounded like a hard way to live. But more than that, I didn’t want my child to be scorned by his father’s family, so I agreed to it.
We were riding through town in his little red pickup truck one day, my feet propped up against the dashboard. He reached over and grabbed one of my toes and pulled it toward him, bending it the wrong way, smiling at me. I told him to stop, That really hurts, and he did it for a moment longer before letting go. I reached over and gave him a push, checking my anger at the last second to be sure I was playful and not aggressive. He didn’t like that, though. He pulled the truck into a parking lot and, with visible anger, ordered, Never touch me like that again. I tried to explain that it was playful, whereas he had really hurt me. I felt like a fool for trying to make a joke out of the anger I had rightfully felt, giving him this ammunition against me. He told me that he wasn’t sure he wanted to marry me and that he would leave me in the parking lot if I weren’t pregnant. Eventually, he decided to forgive me, and we drove away.