by Deborah Emin
The cleverness wore thin. The Skokie inside of me was restless to get away and out of the madness. I knew it was raining but I didn’t know how bad. It didn’t matter. I needed to leave.
I became a human cannonball flying out the back door and down the steps. Philip came flying right behind me. I didn’t care. I wanted to be back here as fast as I could go.
Philip may have been drunk or taken drugs. Whatever it was he ingested, that slobbering sack of meat became a huge drag on my hasty retreat. He couldn’t walk without my help and then couldn’t keep his hands to himself.
On top of that, he had to start with this stupid, whiny bullshit about being in love with me. What a piece of shit he is.
He is Eileen’s boyfriend. I kept reminding him of that. I thought when I saw his car coming after us that she was coming to pick us up, that she was coming to my rescue. But seeing him hanging onto me, she drove off, towards the College and left us to continue on foot.
Philip saw her drive away too. “See,” he said. “She doesn’t love either one of us.” Then he pushed me down on the rain-soaked road and tried to rip my clothes off.
The funny thing was, he was so out of it, he could barely make his hands work. I threw a punch at him, which knocked him off me and ran away, leaving him there in the road to figure out what he could do with himself.
As I got about three blocks away, Eileen came roaring back towards me. I tried to wave her down. She passed me and drove back towards where I had left Philip. A few minutes later, the two of them came racing in the rain back towards the College and of course left me alone to walk all the way home, in the rain, with my clothes falling off my body.
Well, be that way, is what I say. I won’t tell anyone the damn secret that Philip Fairview tried to rape me or that he wanted me to believe that he loved me. I wouldn’t do that to my friend, Eileen, no matter what.
I know this sounds really stupid. Charles is having fun without me. No one knows what Philip tried to do to me.
I wish someone would walk in the door and tell me they were sorry to hear what a bastard that Philip schmuck is and how they’re going to make him pay for what he did to me.
I know that won’t happen. It won’t happen because no one will ever believe me. In the way that Philip talked to me, I understood what it means to feel the hatred of men towards women.
I wish I had another diary right now to write in that was more secret than this one. I’d like to say things I can’t bring myself to put down on the page.
It’s sickening because now Eileen and I won’t be friends like we used to be. That makes things worse. I don’t care that Charles doesn’t like her. She is my best friend. I won’t be able to go to our tree in the orchard again with her. I can’t tell Eileen what happened because I know, she’ll have to choose to believe Philip.
If I repeated what Philip said to me: “You know Scags, I’ve fallen for you in a big way.” She’d haul off and slug me.
I should have let Philip fall in the road so a car could run over him. That would have taught him a lesson.
Yeah, death is a great teacher. He wanted to get his big fat hands all over me. I could have hurt him badly on the road and taken off.
I don’t know why I didn’t. In fact, I tried to protect him from himself.
I really want a different diary to write all this down in and then burn it.
Can you imagine what Charles would say if I ever told him what Philip did?
I have to stop thinking about Eileen’s face as she glared at me out the car window driving by with Philip beside her. I’m going to have to act as if nothing happened, because, really, nothing did. He sure did want to rape me but he couldn’t. I fought him off and that is what I must remember.
The weirdest part of this whole story is this: When I got back to my room, there was a letter sitting prominently on my bed. Attached to it was a note from Kit saying that it had been put into her mailbox by mistake. It was from Aunt Money.
I couldn’t read it right away. I was shaking so hard from the cold and wet. I stripped off all my clothes and threw them away. Then I marched into the shower room and stood under the hot water until the shaking stopped. There wasn’t anyone around. It’s Halloween and people are off at parties everywhere.
When I got out of the shower I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked a bit beaten up. I don’t remember Philip hitting me but he obviously did. I also have some scratches on my breasts and a long thin scratch around my right hip bone.
When I returned from the shower room, I opened Aunt Money’s letter. It wasn’t at all what I had expected.
In part she wrote:
Scags darling, if I could have jumped on that train with you in September to go to the College I would have. I would have done it then and I would have loved to do it when I was your age. At your age, though, I made a huge mistake and got pregnant and had a baby. I put my baby up for adoption because Goldie and Boomer didn’t want me to ruin my life. I’ve missed her every day of my life since then.
Don’t be upset for me. Be you, the wonderful Scags you are.
love always,
Aunt Money
Date: Sunday, 11/2/69
The gray weather Prof. Keating promised has arrived. The rain that came on Halloween ended but the clouds remained. They haven’t left yet and I have a feeling they won’t anytime soon. It can be dark and gloomy in Skokie this time of year, too. Here the gloom has seeped into everything, including the friendships.
Eileen came to my room last night, crying. I thought Philip had told her the truth of what happened on the walk back from the party. I don’t know why I would think that, maybe wishful thinking.
I tried to tell her what had really happened. Then I tried to excuse his behavior to spare her. I suggested it was the drugs he took. Or that he had too much to drink. Then I realized she didn’t want to know the truth. She wanted to believe it was all my fault.
This further assault on me made me do something I swore I wouldn’t do—I showed Eileen the bruises on my breasts and hip. Eileen gasped. I thought that meant she believed me.
But Philip had already concocted another fabulous lie—that I had tried to rape him and that he had to fight me off. That was how I must have gotten the bruises, Eileen told me.
The thing is: I love Eileen. Philip tried to rape me. He may have been on drugs and not known exactly what he was doing, but I don’t care.
Now I hate being here. I just hate it. I can’t let Charles see these bruises. If he does, he will go after Philip, I know that and I don’t want that to happen.
Being shut out of Eileen’s world hurts already. I never knew how much of an anchor she had become.
She’s so angry at me.
I could try to convince her of what really happened but I’ve developed a new kind of exhaustion. I’m tired all the time. Even seeing her so upset and crying like she was, I didn’t have the energy to prove to her that Philip was lying to her.
No one has ever been that angry at me for something I didn’t do.
She wouldn’t listen to me. It’s become his word against mine. Who would I believe if I were in her shoes?
The point is, why would I want to steal Philip from her? She just assumed that was true. It goes to show, she doesn’t know me at all.
How wrong she is and how blind she is. I hate this. I’ll write her a note and tell her how I never liked Philip and so would never throw myself at him in the midst of a rainstorm on the wet road home from Charles’ party.
How cruel of Philip to do this to me and Eileen. He’s ruining our friendship because he doesn’t have the guts to own up to his mistake. I don’t know what to do with myself; I’m so upset.
I miss Eileen and want us to be friends like we were.
Date: Tuesday, 11/4/69
Originally, Charles and I were to go to a lecture by this
linguistics professor, Noam Chomsky. I promised him, I know. He’s right when he says I’m breaking my promise. I have my reasons. One is, I never read the essay by Chomsky called, “The Role of the Intellectual.”
I put off reading it until this past weekend. This past weekend I couldn’t do much of anything. I’ve been so tired. I still am. I don’t even go to Charles’ apartment so I can sleep alone, I’m so tired.
I don’t want to think about war right now either. Even though not going to hear Chomsky meant having another argument with Charles, I couldn’t go. It’s all too tiring. Why won’t everyone leave me alone so I can sleep?
I saw a poster last week that Adrienne Rich was coming here to give a reading. I had discovered her poetry recently. I like it very much. Lauren and I were talking about her poetry. I mentioned that Rich would be reading at the College and not noticing that her reading and Chomsky’s talk were on the same day, I invited Lauren to come with me to the reading. She got so excited. It made me feel that I was doing something for her for a change.
Having to then explain to Charles how I got confused took up so much energy that when after a couple of minutes he calmed down, I was just relieved. I have no energy to waste on anything right now.
I’m a slow learner when it comes to politics. I don’t think it’s because I don’t care about what’s going on in the world. I’m not angry at Charles for knowing more than I do. Or for pointing out that I wasn’t even paying attention when the Democratic Convention was held in Chicago or how the South Side burned and rioted when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. I know my nose was in my books and I ignored everything else that was going on.
These conversations don’t go well between us. He cares so much about what goes on in the world and talks about it with such passion that I end up feeling guilty.
I can’t listen to him when he is carrying on like that. He makes me feel like a defendant at a trial who has caused all these terrible things to happen. Then I really can’t concentrate on what he is talking about.
He asks me, Do you think war is necessary? My answer is: God only knows. When have I ever thought about that? There’s the plain truth. I’ve never given it a moment’s thought. Well, maybe when Dennis, a friend from grade school, began talking about going to college to avoid the draft, I thought, whew, thank God for being a girl and moved right along to my next class as if nothing had been said.
I felt invisible when any of these conversations were going on. I remember when Kennedy was assassinated. I remember my math teacher, Mr. Katz, told us to write down on a piece of paper our thoughts right at that very moment. We had been in class when over the loudspeaker, Mr. Phillips, the principal, told us that Kennedy had been assassinated and that we were going home. Everything was going to close down and we wouldn’t be back to school until after Thanksgiving.
While we waited for the school to let our parents know we were being sent home, Mr. Katz told us to write down everything we felt about that day. He told us that when we got home to seal it up in an envelope and put it somewhere to read years later. It would be like a time capsule. What was it like at that moment when we heard that the president had been shot?
I don’t remember where I put that envelope. I see the blue envelope I put the sheet of ruled paper from my notebook into. I wrote the date on the front of the envelope and licked the glue, closed it and then put tape over the sides of the seal so that I would have to think twice before opening it.
Did Kennedy being shot change my life? It definitely was sad. I cried as I watched the funeral procession on TV with Mama and Pops. They did too. Pops smoked a cigar in “solidarity,” he said with the president who also liked cigars. We bought Pops a rocking chair too.
Once we were back at school, I don’t remember anyone mentioning it again. Or when his brother, Bobby, was killed, I don’t remember much of that day at all. Certainly, I didn’t grasp the significance of the King assassination either. I didn’t even know that he had been in Memphis as Charles told me to support the sanitation workers or that he was planning a march to DC of poor people.
Charles yells at me: “Don’t you see that in our times it has become okay to kill people whose ideas will change the way we live? That the real people in power now pay assassins to take out these guys?”
Maybe Charles thinks there is something I can do. But truthfully, he frightens me when he gets that excited.
Sometimes I believe that Charles has inside information about how the world works. That because his world is so different from mine that he knows things most of us can never know. That he can find out these things because he lives among the very rich and powerful.
I could write more about this but I am too tired.
Date: Wednesday, 11/5/69
I went to the poetry reading with Lauren. Charles went with Tony to hear Chomsky. I’m glad I heard a woman read her own work. It was so rich—hah, hah.
It also ended my exhaustion. Running didn’t help me and sleep didn’t help me but hearing Adrienne Rich read her poems, that cured me.
Listening to Rich read wasn’t the same as hearing Lowell read. The power of a woman’s voice reading her own work affected me in such a different way.
It was comparable to the part of “A Room of One’s Own” when Woolf writes about that one sentence that made her start up and realize something revolutionary had occurred. It was the sentence that must seem to women now so commonplace, but here it is:
“Chloe liked Olivia.”
When I read that sentence I didn’t sit up and realize what had just occurred. However with the insight Woolf provided, it became to me too a touchstone of what has changed and in not that long a period of time.
So, tonight, sitting in that small lecture hall listening to Adrienne Rich read, was to me another one of those miracles, or revolutionary moments. In my life, I haven’t ever heard a woman read her own poetry. I haven’t ever studied women poets, except for a passing reference to Emily Dickinson who was represented as both an anomaly and a nut case. Her virginity being of more interest than her poetry.
Woolf shows the impact of that sentence in an historical way. I don’t know enough about women’s poetry or even Rich’s poems to think this through that way. I wish I could. Instead, I have this observation: It’s difficult to comprehend how radically changed women’s lives are now. And how fast that transformation has come about.
Lauren and I had a long talk about the reading. It was through our talk that I could verbalize these new insights. It’s as if this knowledge has been growing inside me like mushrooms under dead leaves. When I brushed the leaves aside, I discovered these incredible mushrooms that had grown in the dark soil inside me.
Now I see what Tony means when he calls certain awakenings radical conversions, meaning that someone goes through drastic changes at a phenomenal speed. This bubble-enclosed girl from Skokie becoming more engaged by and involved in the world. It has happened so quickly and yet, I don’t think I know now any other way to live.
When Lauren and I talked after the reading, I recalled in explicit detail the way in which everyone in the room held her breath. As Rich read, no one uttered a word, cleared her throat or even breathed. The sense of anticipation for the words to come at us was so high that no one dared make a sound.
Woolf was blown away by Mary Carmichael writing that simple sentence: “Chloe liked Olivia.”
I’m blown away by Rich reading these lines:
The refrigerator falls silent.
Then other things are audible;
There must be stages of involvement in a reading. As a group, we came together rather quickly. I can’t recall the precise moment when I realized how attentive we were but I do know that the collaborative experience of listening to her words sent me into such an excited place that I think I finally understood what poetry is about.
The refrigerator falls silent.
> Then other things are audible;
Now I understand as Woolf had—poetry isn’t only written by men about things defined by men’s lives.
I liked this line in the poem too:
this dull, sheet-metal mind rattling like stage thunder.
This image made me feel just like I do when I listen to a solo piano piece, the way the notes go over my eardrums, as if I were the water skipping over stones in a river and enjoying that feeling so much that it is all I care about.
Lauren and I left the theater when the reading was over and ironically walked towards the orchard. I didn’t want to talk about what had happened on Halloween with anyone but realized, if there was one person I could trust to tell the story to, it was Lauren.
The nights are now cold and as we walked we left our breaths on the air. We turned back, to sit in her car and warm up.
We can be quiet or talk, it isn’t important. I like how we each dove into our responses to the reading without demanding anything of the other. I don’t know how long we sat in her car, but when I got out, a bubble rose above my head with the words, “This is the friend I have looked for all my life.”
Mistakenly, I had thought Eileen would be that friend. Now I know it is Lauren.
How ironic that I learned tonight that Lauren is a singer and songwriter—like Eileen.
Lauren’s self-taught. She told me a bit about her life. She’s from the Town and has lived here almost all her life.