Mimi left the room. I faced the detectives on the opposite couch. Other policemen were coming up to report things in whispered conferences.
Then Mimi was back beside me, holding a glass of water and a handful of pills. ‘You have to take these,’ she said.
‘What for?’
‘Um, in case he had a disease,’ Mimi said wretchedly. ‘Dr Cole said I had to make sure you took them pretty soon.’
I had informed the doctor, in a very terse exchange, that I wouldn’t become pregnant from the attack. I was on the pill. The very idea of pregnancy had filled me with such loathing that I almost vomited. Now I had to make sure I wasn’t diseased. I took two of the pills from Mimi, swallowed them, drank, and shuddered. Then two more. Every time I thought I was through, Mimi handed me more. While I swallowed and shuddered, the detectives began questioning me, their voices quite neutral. I was grateful for that briskness; it helped keep me from collapsing.
And suddenly I became conscious. If it was possible to be walking and talking in a state of unconsciousness, I had been. I could remember my conversation with Mimi’s doctor, but not his face, or his office, except the clock on the wall. I stared at the two detectives, seeing them individually for the first time. They had different faces, I observed. They were not interchangeable, as I would have sworn minutes earlier.
‘What are your names?’
They looked startled, and glanced at each other.
‘Tendall,’ said the gray-haired one.
‘Markowitz,’ said the heavier man with brown hair.
They waited for me to tell them why I’d asked, or give some kind of signal. They were eyeing me warily; they were unsure of what I might do next.
‘He called me Nickie,’ I said. ‘He knows me.’
I had to tell them everything: every word, every act. And I had to hold myself very tight to get through it.
‘I can stand this,’ I assured Mimi, apropos of nothing. ‘I lived through that. I can stand this.’
Then my awareness began flickering again. It was like drifting in and out of anesthesia. At one point I became aware that the pills were all gone and the glass of water was empty. I must have finished taking the capsules. I took Mimi’s hand. Until she gasped, I didn’t realize that I was gripping it with unbearable force. When the detectives were asking me the most delicate questions (‘And did he – uh – experience an orgasm?’) I heard a nagging sort of noise that bothered me, and I glanced around vaguely to find its source. It was Mimi; she was crying.
I didn’t want to cry. I was never going to cry . . .
And I went under again, only coming back to myself when a door slammed. Mimi was standing in front of me and the house was empty. I was in a different bathrobe.
‘What time is it?’
‘Six o’clock,’ she answered. ‘The police are all gone. They asked me to bring you to the police department tomorrow afternoon – today – to take pictures.’
‘Pictures?’
‘Your bruises and cuts.’
I began to laugh. I’d been photographed for years, for my beauty. Now I was going to be photographed for my cuts and bruises. ‘How much will they pay me per hour?’ I gasped.
Mimi collapsed on the couch beside me and began laughing too. Then she began crying. I watched her curiously, my legs carefully parallel, my hands folded neatly in my lap. ‘I’m never going to cry,’ I told her.
Wisely, Mimi didn’t respond to that. ‘You’re going to bed in my room,’ she told me.
The thought of going to sleep, of being vulnerable again, made me begin to shudder. I’d been trembling since I’d crawled from my bed hours ago, but now violent muscle spasms began to shake me. ‘I can’t get up the stairs,’ I said helplessly.
Mimi looked as though she was at the end of her resources. ‘Do you think you can sleep on this couch?’ she suggested finally.
‘Not alone, I can’t be alone.’ The very idea made the shudders intensify. I wanted desperately to bathe, to be clean, even more than I wanted to rest. As soon as the idea occurred to me, I knew I couldn’t sleep until I washed the uncleanliness off me, the filth he had left. ‘I have to bathe,’ I told Mimi.
‘I’ll help you,’ she said with instant comprehension. ‘We’ll have to use your bathroom, though.’
That meant passing through my bedroom to get there. ‘I can do that,’ I mumbled. It was increasingly difficult for me to articulate. I could tell Mimi was having a rough time just understanding me.
‘Okay, here we go,’ she said bracingly. She put her arm around me to help me rise.
I read the utter exhaustion printed on her face. ‘I’m sorry, Mimi,’ I whispered.
‘Shut up, ass,’ she said. ‘I can’t cry anymore.’
I kept my face turned away from the mirror over the sink.
We got me into the bathtub, a tub filled with the hottest water I could stand. I didn’t realize how many cuts I had until I sank into the water. I became fully aware as soon as I submerged. I hissed at the sting. But my God, it was a blessed thing to wash. I dipped my head down in the tub as the simplest way to clean my hair. The water became so soapy with repeated latherings that Mimi finally drained the tub and turned on the shower attachment to rinse me off.
After the bath, my mind was more at ease. I felt cleaner inside and out; perhaps a particle of what I’d undergone had been washed away. Some of my cuts had reopened in the water. Mimi bandaged them. Then she found my nightgown and helped me into it. It had been a long time since I’d worn one, and I only knew where it was because I’d unpacked so recently. Mimi looked a little surprised when I asked for it.
‘I’ll never sleep naked again,’ I said flatly. ‘I don’t know how much of this will stay with me, but that is one thing I do know I will never do again.’
Finally, finally, I was ready to stretch out on the couch, with Mimi ensconced on the one opposite. It was daylight. A few cars were moving on the street. The world had come alive again after the death of the night.
I knew when I put my head on the pillow that I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I would mime it for Mimi’s sake, since she was obviously at the end of her rope. I would keep watch over us.
The next second I was asleep.
8
WHEN I AWOKE there was a man standing over me. I drew in my breath to scream.
‘It’s all right, Nickie,’ Cully said urgently. He knelt beside the couch. ‘It’s all right. It’s me.’
After a moment my pulse slowed, my breathing eased. ‘Better in a minute,’ I whispered. We waited.
I could tell by the slant of the sun across the floor that it was afternoon. Cully was wearing blue jeans. I wondered why he didn’t have a suit on, and realized it was Saturday. I felt slovenly in my wrinkled nightgown. I wrapped the light blanket around me as firmly as I could and swung my legs to sit up. My breath whistled in sharply. Movement brought pain. I stared at a dust mote dancing in the air until I had adjusted to this pain.
Cully observed me silently. He sat on the couch beside me. I knew what my face must look like by now; I turned it to him. Directly, deliberately, for once with no artifice, I looked directly into his eyes.
I watched his own face change. I had finally gotten to Cully. The wound healer saw a massive gash in a human being he knew.
I watched him search for something to say. Cully, the articulate psychologist, was struggling for words. I waited, full of unused anger, my eyes fixed on his face.
He’d never been a toucher, by inclination and by training. But when the words didn’t come, he touched me. He searched out a square inch of my face that wasn’t damaged and he kissed it very gently.
I remembered thinking once that I would have to survive a bad car smashup to rate a kiss. Well, I’d done it. I turned from him, ashamed of my anger. It shouldn’t be focused on him, of all people. He was the one man in Knolls I could acquit of being the rapist. No matter what the circumstances, I would have known Cully.
‘Where’s Mimi?’
I asked quietly. It seemed an eerie echo from two months ago.
‘Trying to calm Mother down. They’re in the kitchen.’
I told him bluntly that I didn’t want to see Elaine.
‘I know. We’ll try to keep her out.’ Then he said tentatively, ‘I think I’m going to move in here for a while.’
I felt a vast indifference. During the long night my edifice of pride and independence, my integrity, had collapsed after the voice had come from the darkness. Today another structure, called Cully, had slid to the ground. All the feelings I’d built up around Cully’s image seemed to crumble in the space of five minutes. For the first time in fourteen years he was just Cully, Mimi’s brother, comforting a female he’d known for years, his little sister’s best friend.
Now I was a grown woman with no girl left. No structures at all, and I had to start all over again.
I didn’t know the first thing about the man at my side. And I wondered for a bleak moment if I really knew Mimi. I suspected I didn’t even know myself.
I had no frills left.
At this illuminating and painful moment, Elaine Houghton went out of bounds and swept into the living room, Mimi on her heels with hands outstretched as if she were thinking of physically restraining her mother.
* * * *
Today I looked at Elaine bare. I’d always tended to think of her as a one-dimensional comic-book villainess. Of course, she was human – perhaps not a good mother, but capable of moments of generosity and sympathy. Elaine squatted before me, took one of my hands in hers, and said, ‘Nickie, I’m so sorry this happened to you. It upsets me no end that this has happened to you in our little town, while you’re Mimi’s guest.’ To her credit, she did no more than clench her teeth and swallow hard when she got a close-up of my face.
That’s Elaine, I thought. Really sorry it happened at all, but even sorrier that it happened in Knolls in a family home. Obviously Cully had inherited his ‘slap, stroke’ technique from Elaine. But almost in the same instant I realized I was being grossly unfair. Elaine had undoubtedly been scared out of her wits. Her daughter had been only yards away from a terrible crime, and perhaps had escaped being its victim only by being on the second floor of the house.
‘I know you’ll want to leave us now, and you’ve only been here a few weeks. Please don’t think badly of us.’
‘Leave?’ I said blankly.
‘I hardly imagine you’ll want to stay here,’ she said in surprise. ‘I mean, with everyone knowing . . . you’ll be more comfortable where nobody knows.’
‘Why?’ Fool that I was, I really couldn’t imagine why. How could I get the support I needed, if no one around me knew me? Where should I go? Home to Mama, who would cry over me and then get drunk? Home to my stepfather, good old Jay?
Elaine began to lose her assurance. Her dark bird-wing brows contracted. ‘Why, Nickie . . . Who could you date here? I think you’ve learned an awful lesson, the hard way, bless your heart, but surely you’ll want to start all over again somewhere else.’
The three of us stared at her. Elaine rocked back on her haunches, a hard thing to accomplish in a ladylike manner in a skirt; but she managed.
Cully said, ‘Mimi, do you understand what Mother’s saying?’
‘Yes,’ Mimi answered wearily. She rubbed a hand across her forehead.
‘What?’ I asked. ‘What’s she saying?’
‘She means no one will want to date you here, since you’re damaged goods now,’ Mimi answered. ‘I think she’s hinting that you somehow brought your rape on yourself.’
Elaine had drawn herself up. She was not used to face-to-face challenges. She was not used to open contempt from her daughter. She wasn’t sensitive, but she would have needed a hide of iron not to feel her children’s exasperation and dislike at this moment.
‘Not exactly “brought it on yourself,” ’ she protested. ‘It’s letting them think they’re equal, welfare letting them have anything they want without having to work for it or pay for it. And the clothes girls wear now.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe this.’ I leaned back against the soft couch and shut my eyes. But there was a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.
‘You probably just smiled at one on the street and they just thought it was an invitation.’
If Elaine Houghton felt this way, surely others would too. Elaine had never had an original emotion in her life. I hoped her comments would just evaporate; but they stuck to my skin, they congealed. I had more to face than I had imagined.
‘Mother, go away,’ Cully said quietly. I could feel his arm muscles tense.
‘Mrs Houghton,’ I said, opening my eyes and leaning forward painfully. ‘Listen to me. You’re Mimi’s mother, and I don’t want to be rude to you. But you have to understand how I feel. What happened last night . . .’ I drew a breath. ‘Getting raped . . . was in no way my fault. If I’d walked down the street buck naked, I would still in no way deserve what happened to me. I am not ashamed. If my purse had been snatched, you wouldn’t be saying what you’ve been saying. This was . . . another crime, a nastier crime. An act of hatred. But it was not my fault any more than a purse snatch would be.’
As I mumbled this lengthy speech through swollen lips, I probed myself for the truth of what I was telling Elaine. I was formulating my thoughts as I spoke. It was true. I was not ashamed. But it was also true that I was horrified that even strangers to me would know approximately what had passed in the dark of my bedroom. It was sickening to conjecture that some people would look at me and try to picture my rape; perhaps secretly enjoy that picture, or think it served me right, in some mysterious way. There are a lot of black crevices in the corners of sympathy. Last night I’d fallen into one that had widened into an abyss.
‘I don’t know if you can see this,’ I said to Elaine and to myself. ‘But the man who raped me wants me to be destroyed by what he did. He wanted to hurt me; and he did. I couldn’t do one damn thing about it. But he wants me to keep on hurting. I can do something about that. I won’t give him the satisfaction.’ My fingers were clenched in fists by the time I finished. I meant what I said down to my bones, I meant it more than I’ve ever meant anything.
‘Well,’ Elaine said briskly, ‘I think you’re making a mistake, Nickie.’ She rose in one graceful movement and brushed her hands against her skirt. Washing herself clean of me. ‘You would forget a lot faster if you moved away. But you’re a grown woman, and Mimi owns this house, so I guess there’s nothing more I can say.’
But of course there was. Elaine was deeply shaken, not only by the anger of her children but by what she must have seen as a NOW diatribe delivered by, of all people, a former model. Elaine’s face was red; she was holding down her voice with an effort. ‘I personally feel you should get out of town and try to put this behind you. And may I add, Don agrees with me.’
Mimi and her brother exchanged glances. Mimi had long ago told me that her father agreed with everything Elaine said, to keep the peace and because he loved her. He just did what he wanted after he’d completed his lip service.
‘When you get over this being brave to impress people’ – and Elaine glanced pointedly from me to Cully – ‘you may take my advice.’ Her face twisted with genuine passion. ‘Honey, how are you going to pass them on the street? Knowing one of them raped you? They’ll all talk about it, you know. How will you be able to stand it? I bet half the niggers in town know who did it, but will they tell? Oh no, not on one of their own.’
In the North I’d become accustomed to racism being more cleverly cloaked, among my chic acquaintances. I’d temporarily forgotten Elaine’s earlier ranting about ‘welfare’ and ‘taking things for free.’ Now I understood what she had meant all along. White men wouldn’t date me because a black man had raped me, she thought.
‘Mrs Houghton, the man who raped me was white. I don’t know anything else about him; but I do know that he was not black. I know from the voice.’
That sh
ocked Elaine more than anything else I could have said. She stared at me in utter disbelief. Then she obviously decided I was making my rapist white out of rampant liberalism. ‘You poor child,’ she said, and marched out the door.
‘What can I say?’ Mimi cried. ‘Nick, I’m so sorry.’
‘I wonder how much of what she said is true.’
‘Nothing!’
‘A little,’ Cully said. Mimi made a violent gesture of protest, but Cully raised his hand to silence her. ‘You’re going to notice changes in attitudes,’ he told me steadily. ‘But mostly it’ll be because people won’t know how to express sympathy to a woman who’s just been through a rape. They’ll be uncomfortable, because they won’t know whether you want to talk about it, or maybe couldn’t stand it being mentioned. It’s almost like . . .’ He thought for a moment. ‘Like you had an enormous green wart on the tip of your nose. No one here would ever dream of mentioning it to you, out of kindness and embarrassment. Even if you had that green wart removed, people still wouldn’t say anything – for fear of admitting that it had disfigured you before.’
I nodded. I could remember how it bad been, when this had been the only country I knew. And I remembered, with shame, how uncomfortable I’d been when I talked with Barbara Tucker. I’d put her misery at arm’s distance. I was guilty of more than an open window after all, I decided.
‘Men, especially, may be uncomfortable,’ Cully continued, still speaking in his steady professional voice, but with his eyes averted.
Thanks, Cully. I’d already figured that out.
‘They may feel guilty that one of them did this to you. Maybe they’ll feel uneasy about how you’re going to react to other men now – dating and sex and so forth.’
‘Gosh, it’s great having a psychologist in the family,’ Mimi said savagely. She mimed gap-mouthed admiration.
‘I need to be forewarned, Mimi,’ I said. ‘I’d never . . . naturally, I’d never thought of all this.’ Others were certainly going to invest a lot of emotion in my tragedy.
A Secret Rage Page 8