He had the element of surprise, but Gretchen’s tall, at least for a Sedaris, and powerful. As soon as she got her bearings, she broke loose and headed to the nearest house for help. No lights came on, so she ran three blocks down the middle of the street and onto our front porch. I heard a banging on my door, and when I opened it she bolted past me into the kitchen, then stood trembling and mute—in shock, most likely, and with leaves in her hair. I phoned the police and set about hiding my drugs. After that I called my parents, aware that I was stealing someone else’s news, and aware too of how dramatic I sounded. “Gretchen’s been attacked.”
The officer who arrived began by saying that he’d been in my apartment once before. “It was a narcotics case, years ago,” he told me, looking from the kitchen to the living room, where dozens of index cards dangled from the ceiling. He took my sister’s statement, and as he drove off to canvass the area, our parents pulled up, my mother saying before she’d even set her purse down that this was all Gretchen’s fault. “Walking to the store at eleven o’clock at night, you were as good as asking for it!”
Our father, who has always distorted time to suit his purposes, put the blame on me. “It was one o’clock in the morning, and you let your sister wander the streets by herself?”
“It wasn’t one,” I said. “It’s not even one now.”
“Aw, baloney.”
The policeman returned carrying Gretchen’s grocery bag along with a mayonnaise jar containing a half-dead moth and a ball of cotton soaked in fingernail polish remover. “Is this…yours?” he asked.
My father gave my sister his “now I’ve seen it all” look. “Oh, that’s nice,” he said. “Caught yourself a pretty little butterfly while you were traipsing home alone at two in the morning?”
The following day he took Gretchen to the police station, where she was scheduled to look through mug shots. The fellow who’d attacked her had been black. She’d noticed he was wearing a white T-shirt, but then her glasses got knocked off and it all became a blur.
“All right,” said the policeman. “Let’s talk about pants. Think now—were they long or short?”
When Gretchen said “long,” my father slapped his palm on the tabletop. “There you go,” he said. “Now we’re getting somewhere!”
After that day’s shift at the natural-foods restaurant, I returned to my apartment and found my dad and sister waiting for me. “We can’t count on the police to catch this guy,” my father said. “So what we’re going to do is ride around and see if we can’t find him ourselves.”
“We’re going to drive around and look for a black man?” I asked.
“With long pants and a white T-shirt on,” Gretchen added. “Clothes he couldn’t possibly have changed because they’re permanently attached to his body.”
“Don’t be a smart-ass,” our father said. “This person tried to rape you, don’t forget. You think it’s just a onetime thing, like, ‘Well, that didn’t work, so I guess I’ll turn my life around, maybe sell ice cream instead’?”
He wasn’t the only one who was angry. All morning at work I’d imagined myself going back in time and coming across this person as he attacked my sister. In the fantasy I was just walking along, minding my own business at eleven o’clock on a Wednesday night, when I heard a woman scream and saw some movement in the bushes. At this, I grabbed the guy by the collar, saying something polite but at the same time hostile, like, “Excuse me, friend…” Then I imagined hitting him the way men in movies did, my fist making contact with a smart cracking sound, his jaw splitting open like a ripe melon. Once I got him down on the ground, I’d pound on him until Gretchen jumped in, saying, “David, stop! Stop before you kill him.”
It was an engaging little daydream but would have been a lot more satisfying if the guy had been white, or at least whitish, a Spanish exchange student, or a traveling Hawaiian in town on business. Of all the possibilities, why did he have to be black, especially in North Carolina, where everything was so loaded? I think Gretchen was feeling the same way—not that she needed to let this slide but that she was caught up in some tiresome cliché. Now here was her father organizing a posse.
The situation got weirder still when I noticed the baseball bat lying across the backseat of the car. This wasn’t something that had been brought from home—we’d no sooner own a baseball bat than a trident. Rather, it was brand-new and still had a price tag on it.
“You bought a baseball bat?”
“Calm down,” my father told me. “If we don’t catch the guy, maybe your brother can use it.”
“For what?” I said. “Since when does Paul care about baseball? On top of that, you don’t even know who we’re looking for.”
My father was hoping that Gretchen might identify her attacker through his body language—the way he walked or moved his hands. Likelier still, she could perhaps recognize his voice. This was possible, surely, and I could understand it if the field of potential suspects was narrowed down—a lineup of five behind mirrored glass, say. As it stood, every black male in Raleigh between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five was a possible candidate, especially those with long pants and white T-shirts on.
“This is ridiculous,” Gretchen moaned. Our father drove past the pancake house and turned onto Hillsborough Street, stopping soon after to point to a black man. “Does that one look familiar?” he asked.
The guy was perhaps in his early twenties and was holding a can of Coke to his mouth, a can he lowered when we pulled alongside him and my father stuck his head out the window. “Listen,” he said, “I need you to tell me how to get to the Capitol Building.”
The young man pointed in the direction we had come from and said that it wasn’t very far.
My father turned to Gretchen. “Is anything coming back to you?”
“Dad, please.”
Sensing something strange was happening, the young man stepped away from the car and continued down the street. “Hey,” my father called. “Hey, you!”
The next black man he stopped had a beat-up cast on his arm, and the one after that had an African accent and scars like whiskers on his face. Then Gretchen asked to be taken back to her apartment. She was waitressing that night, and my father insisted on driving her to work. Getting her home, he let me know, was my responsibility. “I still can’t believe you let her wander around by herself at three o’clock in the morning.”
One thing the adults all seemed to agree on was that Gretchen was remiss in walking to the grocery store. So remiss, according to some, that you couldn’t really blame the guy who attacked her, as what was he supposed to think, a young woman out on her own at that hour—a young woman in shorts, no less?
“But doesn’t the killing jar count for anything?” I argued. “Is it that hard to distinguish a prostitute from a college student? Whores don’t wear glasses. And what about me? I walk to the store all the time.”
The rules, of course, were different for women. When they were young, each of my sisters was approached by a stranger, someone in a car who’d pretend to be lost and needing directions. The girls would come up to the rolled-down window and see that the driver’s pants were unzipped, that his penis was hard, and that he was stroking it. It wasn’t the same guy every time—one might be bald and wearing sunglasses, while another could have long sideburns and a lazy eye—but it happened in turn to all the Sedaris girls. They’d see a man their father’s age masturbating, and afterward they’d wander into the house, never hysterical but slightly dazed, as if they’d been stopped by a talking cat.
I felt left out and remember asking my father why it never happened to me.
“Well, think about it,” he said. “Exposing yourself to a girl is one thing. Doing it to a boy, though—the guy would have to be perverted.”
Then there were the strangers who called the house. “You want to eat my what?” I once heard my mother say into the receiver. “Buddy, if that’s what you’re after, you are talking to the wrong lady.” Then she la
ughed, not cruelly but in a way that seemed genuine. Had she said, “Here, let me put my daughter on the phone,” it wouldn’t have surprised me.
There’d been something almost comic about the exhibitionists and crank callers, the sense that, more than anything, these men were to be pitied. Touching, though, that was something else. Then there was the racial divide. I don’t mean to suggest that my father was operating on a double standard—he’d have gone out looking for a white would-be rapist as well. I just don’t think he’d have felt so frustrated and out of his element.
The day after poring over mug shots, Gretchen had a class. I worked at the restaurant and came home to find my dad sitting on my front porch. It seemed that, with my sister or without her, he was determined to find the man who’d attacked her. It was beyond ridiculous at this point, but I think he knew that. Someone you love is assaulted by a stranger, and you can either sit at home and do nothing or drive around with an iced vodka and water tinkling between your legs, not just looking at other men but really looking at them, studying them, the way the students in the drawing class studied me. “Well, that’s something new,” my father said at one point, gesturing to a guy with a shower cap on his head.
It was rare for my dad and me to spend time alone, rarer still to be on the same team, and with a bat, no less. We both wanted to protect Gretchen, though neither of us was ultimately able to. After getting accepted to RISD, she moved to Providence and even learned to drive. She was in her car one night and had just pulled up in front of her apartment when a man yanked open the passenger door and jumped in beside her. “He was white,” she reported, “wearing jeans and a red plaid jacket.” Luckily she scared him off by laying on her horn. A few months later, following a long shift at the restaurant she worked at, she fell asleep and awoke to find three men standing around her bed. This was a case of her needing protection from herself, as it turned out they were firefighters. It seemed she’d gone to bed with a pan of popcorn on the stove and had slept through the kitchen full of smoke, the phone calls from her neighbors, and the concerted pounding on her door.
All that was in the future on the afternoon my father and I cruised around Raleigh, looking for potential rapists. For a while the two of us talked about Gretchen, imagining the worst that might have happened and stoking our anger. Then we talked about all my sisters and how much they needed us, or at least him. I was disappointed when my dad’s drink ran out and he headed back to drop me off at my apartment. I somehow hadn’t realized until that moment how much I dreaded the place, how freighted it was with the sense of failure. It seemed that I’d missed some pivotal step on the path to adulthood. My father went from high school to the navy to college to IBM, skipping from one to the next like they were stones in a river he was crossing. These wouldn’t have been my choices, surely, but you had to admire his single-mindedness. When I thought of my path, I recalled several quaaludes I’d taken a week earlier, pills that had somehow caused me to fall up the flight of stairs from my apartment to Gretchen’s. Was this what the rest of my life would be like? I wanted to say to my father, “Help me,” but what came out was “Do you think you could maybe loan me twenty dollars?”
“There is absolutely no chance of that happening,” he said.
“What about ten?”
It wasn’t long afterward that Gretchen got her acceptance letter. The news superseded her attack, and though she wouldn’t move for another three months, in a way it was like she’d already gone. The incident that had bound us together now felt like the end of something, a chapter that for her might be titled “The Life Before My Real Life Began.”
I missed the pizza after she’d left, but more than that I missed her, missed having someone naive enough to believe in me. When she returned she’d be just like the other friends who’d moved on, the ones who flew home for Christmas and made you feel like a loser. Not that they tried to. Sure, they’d mention their celebrity sightings, the art shows and opportunities in their exciting new cities, but always there would come that moment when their talk turned back to Raleigh and how much they supposedly missed it. “Because the people, my God,” they’d say. “And you can get such good spaces here—an apartment for, what do you pay, David, one fifty a month?”
A person needed savings in order to move, but more than that he needed gumption. The mink I’d returned that day in Washington would not have helped me get out of North Carolina. With the money I could have sold it for, I’d have undoubtedly stayed just where I was, living meagerly from week to week and inventing other excuses for myself. It did not escape my attention that while modeling for the drawing class I was both literally and figuratively standing still. It was a position I’d hold for another three years, a long time when you’re going nowhere, and an interminable one when you’re going nowhere fast.
Just a Quick E-mail
Hey, Robin,
Just a quick e-mail to thank you for the wedding gift, or “wedding gift certificate,” I guess I should say. Two free pizzas—how thoughtful of you. And how generous: any toppings we want!
Maybe you hadn’t heard that I’d registered at Tumbridge & Colchester. Last June, I think it was, just before we announced the engagement. Not that the pizzas didn’t come in handy; they did, though in a slightly indirect way. Unlike you, who’re so wonderfully unconcerned with what other people think, I’m a bit vain, especially when it comes to my figure. That being the case, I used the certificates to feed our workmen, who are currently building a small addition. I know you thought our house was big enough already. “Tara meets DressBarn” was how I heard you so cleverly describe it at the wedding. “I mean, really,” you said. “How much room do two people need?”
Or did you say, “Two thin people”? What with the band playing and everyone in the world shouting their congratulations, it was a little hard to hear. Just like it is at our ever-expanding house—the workers all hammering away! What they’ve done is tear down the wall between the kitchen and the breakfast nook. That’ll give us room for a walk-in silverware drawer and this new sixteen-burner stove I’ve been eyeing. Plus it will allow us to expand the counter space, put in a second dishwasher, and install an electric millstone for grinding blue corn. (Homemade tortillas, anyone?) Then we’re going to enclose that useless deck, insulate it, and create a separate dining room for when we go Asian. This will eliminate that ramp you’re so fond of, but it’s not like we see you all that often and I don’t think it will kill you to crawl up a half dozen stairs. As a matter of fact, as long as they’re clean, I actually think it might be good for you.
Seeing as we’re on this subject, Robin, is it right to insist on all this special treatment? More than that, is it healthy? It’s been almost a year since the car accident. Don’t you think it’s time you moved on with your life? Do I need to remind you of all my injuries: the dislocated shoulder, the practically broken wrist that still tingles when I do something strenuous like whisk in damp weather? On top of that, it took me days to wash your blood out of my hair. The admitting nurse put me down as a redhead—that’s how bad it was—your left front tooth practically embedded in my skull! It’s no severed spinal cord, of course, but like Dr. Gaffney says, the ball is in your court now. Either you can live in the past as a lonely, bitter paraplegic, or you can live in the present as one. I dusted myself off and got back on the proverbial horse, so why can’t you?
In other news, did you get the postcard I sent from our honeymoon? Iraq was beautiful, just as I imagined it would be, but there were so many Americans there! I said to Philip, “Is nowhere safe? I mean, really. In terms of the crowds, we might as well have gone to Paris!” Then, of course, we did go to Paris, but it was for work rather than vacation. Philip had a client he needed to meet, an American in town for some big Chablis auction. He once defended her on a drunk-driving charge, and successfully too, this despite her Breathalyzer results and some pretty bad behavior, some of which was caught on video. Now they’re suing the people she hit, or at least the one who l
ived, and it looks like they’ve got a fairly good chance of winning. This is not to worry you in any way. What with the addition on the house and the million and a half other things on my to-do list, a lawsuit is the last thing on my mind. Not that it wasn’t proposed.
While my hardworking husband consulted with his client, I, alone, wandered the quays, stopping every now and then to duck into a boutique. And more than once I thought of you. For Paris, I remembered, is where you and Philip honeymooned. That was in the good old days, when the dollar and the euro were practically even. Now it costs a king’s ransom just for a cup of coffee and a croque-madame, so a pair of shoes from Christian Louboutin—well, you can just imagine! I suppose that for you it would make sense, but for someone who walks the way I do, someone known to practically gallop when there’s a sale taking place—the shoes I got are good for one, maybe two seasons at the most. Still, though, what could I do? Iraq had been totally picked over by the time we arrived, and I wanted a little something to remind me of my trip.
After returning stateside Philip went right to work. His number one job: to make me happy. First, we started on the addition ($$$$$$$), then came a successful effort to erase that DWI from my driving record. It wasn’t easy, but legal matters rarely are. All I can say is that if it helps to have friends, it helps even more to have friends who are governors!
None of this will get you out of your wheelchair, but it will restore my self-confidence and what I like to think of as my good name. It means, as well, that you’ll have to stop calling me the “drunken bitch” who “took away” your legs and then “stole” your husband. “Drunk,” it seems, is a relative term, and if I were you I’d watch how I used it. The leg bit is an exaggeration, as you clearly still have them (big purple veins and all). As for the stealing, Philip came to me of his own volition—one adult to another, no coercion involved. In the end all you’re left with is the single word “bitch,” which could mean any number of things. I myself would use it to describe someone whose idea of an appropriate wedding present is a gift certificate for two pizzas! Offering it to your ex-husband, I can understand, but to your own sister? That’s just tacky.
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