by Lena Dunham
Toward the beginning of my Grape career Mike and I dirty-danced at a party, his knee wedged deep between my legs, a fact he seemed not to remember at the next staff meeting. He ran The Grape with an iron fist, verbally abusing underlings right and left, but I passed muster and he often invited me to sit with him in the cafeteria, where he and his tiny Jewish sidekick, Goldblatt, ate plates piled high with lo mein, veggie burgers, and every kind of dry, dry cake. Mike and I were engaged in a constant war of words. It was flirtatious. We worked hard to impress and even harder to seem like we didn’t care.
“I don’t think monogamy can ever work,” he told me one day as we were meeting over cafeteria hash browns.
“I don’t care. I’m not your girlfriend,” I said.
“And thank God for that, toots.”
I giggled. I was something far cooler than a girlfriend. I was a reporter. A temptress. A sophomore.
That winter, I went home for a month with mono, and during that time Mike checked in with me often, under the pretense that he was “struggling, missing my A team over here” and getting pulverized by our rival, The Oberlin Review. On the night of my return, glands still swollen, I wore a vintage wedding dress to dinner with him and Goldblatt at the nicest restaurant in town. Mike smiled at me like we were a real couple (a couple that brought a tiny Jewish sidekick everywhere we went).
A few weeks later Mike came over to my room to watch Straw Dogs. I told him how disturbed I was by its depiction of female sexuality, of a woman who hated being coveted and really wanted to be taken advantage of, and then he lay on top of me and we kissed for forty minutes.
What followed was a torturous affair that resulted in, by the numbers:
One and a half rounds of intercourse
One shared shower (my first)
About seven brokenhearted poems that described the way “our bellies slapped together that night”
One very unnecessary pregnancy test
And one time I showed up to a party he was having with a red running nose and residual mono symptoms, begged him to talk to me in a corner, then fainted. I was carried home by his roommate Kyle, who encouraged me to respect myself.
When I was seven I learned the word “rape,” but I thought it was “rabe.” I pronounced it like the playwright, not the broccoli, and I used it with reckless abandon. One afternoon as I read on the couch, my two-year-old sister toddled over to me, her balloon-printed pajamas saggy in the butt from a dirty diaper. Oh, the injustice of having to live with a child. Grace, wanting desperately to play, grabbed at my feet and ankles. When that failed to elicit a reaction, she began to climb me like a jungle gym, giggling that baby giggle.
“Mom! Papa!” I screamed. “She’s rabing me! She’s rabing me!”
“What?” my mother asked, desperately trying to keep her lips from curling into a smile.
“Grace is rabing me.”
Mike was the first person to go down on me, after a party to benefit Palestine, on my dorm room rug. I felt like I was being chewed on by a child that wasn’t mine. The first time we had sex was the second time I’d ever done it. He put on some African music, kissed me like it was a boring job given to him by his parole officer, and I clung to him, figuring he’d let me know if this wasn’t what sex was supposed to be like. When he finally came, he made little, scared-sounding noises like a cat stuck in the rain. I kept moving until he told me to stop.
Noni and I are at the newsstand across from Grace’s preschool, waiting for pickup. I am nine years old and have the day off of school, which is my dream, but I haven’t used it well. Noni is my nanny. She is from Ireland and was in a bad car accident when she was sixteen that made it so her jaw will only open so far. Her hair is crispy from hairspray, and she wears leggings that show her tan calves. We are looking at magazines and drinking iced teas. The man who owns the newsstand looks at me a moment, and for some reason it sends a shiver down my spine.
“Noni,” I whisper, panicked. “Noni.”
She removes her head from her People magazine and leans down to me. I know the real word now.
“What’s doing?”
“I think he’s trying to rape me.”
I helped Mike and Goldblatt buy finches for an installation art project and, when they got loose in the bathroom of Renson Cottage, I used my experience as an Audubon volunteer to corral the birds into a darkened corner and gather them in my hands. The finch beat its wings, and I thought how holding a small bird is the closest a nonsurgeon will come to feeling a naked beating heart. The bird pecked at my hands, but I’m not squeamish, and I shoved it back into the cage. How many girls can do that?
In May, Mike graduated along with his whole gang of merry bandits: Goldblatt, Kyle (an expert on Costa Rican culture), and Quinn, a textiles student whose senior project involved creating bathing suits with holes where the crotches should have been. The only one who was left behind was Barry. Barry would now be considered a super senior, a dubious distinction given to those with one more semester to finish.
Barry, Audrey and I agreed, was creepy. He had a mustache that rode the line between ironic Williamsburg fashion and big-buck hunter, and he wore the kind of white Reeboks last seen in an ’80s exercise video. He worked part-time at the library, and I would often see him skulking along the aisles, shelving books in the wrong places. In social settings, he commanded attention with his aggressively masculine physicality and a voice that went Barry White low. There was a story about him punching a girl in the boobs at a party. He was a Republican. All reasons to avoid him and to wonder why they let him into the living room of Renson Cottage so much.
In his super-senior semester, Barry seemed lost. With his friends gone, his brow had softened. You could see him smoking cigarettes alone, kicking at the ground in front of the student union and sitting in Mike’s old place in the computer lab like a dog without an owner.
Who’s the big guy now?
There was a particularly raucous party in the loft above the video store. I wore Audrey’s fancy wrap dress, and we drank two beers each before we left and split a Xanax she still had from a flight to Boca with her grandma. It hit me hard and fast, and by the time we showed up I was possessed by a party spirit quite alien to me. Audrey, on the other hand, became dizzy and after much deliberation went home, making me promise to treat her wrap dress with the proper respect. I missed her keenly for a moment, then snorted a small amount of cocaine off a key, before kissing a freshman and dancing into the bathroom line, where I showed people how easily Audrey’s wrap dress opened and explained how “bogus” the creative writing department was.
All my friends were gone. I looked for Audrey, even though she’d told me she was leaving, and I’d also watched her go.
Finally, from behind, I saw my friend Joey. Sweet, oafish Joey—DJ and snugglebunny full of Michigan pride. There he was, in his Members Only jacket, tall and warm and ready to save me. I snuck up behind him and jumped on his back.
When he turned around, it wasn’t Joey. It was Barry. Uh-oh played in my head like a loser’s sound effect on a Japanese talk show. Uh-oh uh-oh uh-oh.
“I haven’t seen you in a while,” he said.
“Well, we don’t know each other,” I told him. “I have to pee.”
Barry leads me to the parking lot. I tell him to look away. I pull down my tights to pee, and he jams a few of his fingers inside me, like he’s trying to plug me up. I’m not sure whether I can’t stop it or I don’t want to.
Leaving the parking lot, I see my friend Fred. He spies Barry leading me by the arm toward my apartment (apparently I’ve told him where I live), and he calls out my name. I ignore him. When that doesn’t work, he grabs me. Barry disappears for a minute, so it’s just Fred and me.
“Don’t do this,” he says.
“You don’t want to walk me home, so just leave me alone,” I slur, expressing some deep hurt I didn’t even know I had. “Just leave me alone.”
He shakes his head. What can he do?
Now Barry’s in my place.
Now we’re on my floor, doing all the things grown-ups do. I don’t know how we got here, but I refuse to believe it’s an accident.
Now he’s inside me, but he’s only sort of hard. I look onto the floor, by his pale bent knee, and see he’s taken off the condom. Did I tell him to wear a condom? The condom came from my first-aid kit. I knew where that was, he didn’t, so I must have crawled for it. A choice. Why does he think it’s okay to take it off?
I come to a little, realize this is not a dream. I tell him he has to put the condom back on. He’s not hard, and now he’s going down on me, and he’s pushing his dick in my face. It feels like a finger without bones.
I moan, as if to say, I like this, so much.
He calls me baby. Or says, “Oh baby,” which is different.
“Do you want to make me come?” I ask.
“Hunh?” he asks.
“Do you want to make me come?” I ask again, and I know that if I make these sounds and ask these questions, then it is, again, a choice.
Now we’re across the room, our bodies in a new formation. I tip my head back as far as it will go. And up, in my roommate’s tree, I see another condom. Or the same condom. A condom that isn’t on him and maybe never was.
Now I am pulling myself up messily like a just-born foal, throwing Barry and all his clothes out the sliding door into the parking lot. He’s clutching his shirt, struggling with a boot. The winter air seems to sober him up, and I shut the door and watch from behind the glass as he looks for the direction home. I wouldn’t want to run into him now. Now I am hiding in the kitchenette, waiting for him to be gone.
Now I wake up. My roommate isn’t home. Later, I will learn she heard sounds from outside the door and went upstairs to sleep with a friend rather than interrupt me.
Before sunrise, I diligently enter the encounter into the Word document I keep, titled “Intimacy Database.” Barry. Number Four. We fucked. 69’d. It was terribly aggressive. Only once. No one came.
When I was young, I read an article about a ten-year-old girl who was raped by a stranger on a dirt road. Now nearly forty, she recalled lying down in a gingham dress her mother had sewn for her and making sounds of pleasure to protect herself. It seemed terrifying and arousing and like a good escape plan. And I never forgot this story, but I didn’t remember until many days after Barry fucked me. Fucked me so hard that the next morning I had to sit in a hot bath to soothe myself. Then I remembered.
The day after Barry, Audrey and I meet up to do homework in the computer lab. We are both still in our pajamas, layers and layers to guard against the cold. In the bathroom we are washing our hands, letting them linger in the hot water, and I say, “I have to tell you something.” We crawl up onto the ledge above the radiator, and we huddle together, and I describe the events of the night before, finishing with “I’m sorry about your wrap dress.”
Audrey’s pale little face goes blank. She clutches my hand and, in a voice reserved for moms in Lifetime movies, whispers, “You were raped.”
I burst out laughing.
That night I am Gchatting with Mike. He lives in San Francisco now, works at an ad agency, and dates a girl with a pill problem and what he calls “a phat ass.” Her Myspace name is Rainbowmolly.
12:30 AM
me: fool
i called you
Mike: i know
i’ve been hung ove
r
hungover
me: me too
12:31 AM
Mike: REALLY
me: i got so drunked up
Mike: nice
i vomited on myself
me: ew
are you ok?
Mike: yes
12:32 AM
i haven’t
left my house
me: i did something so retarded
you will laugh at me
Mike: tell me
12:33 AM
TELL ME
me: i went home with you weird friend Barry
Mike: --------------------
haha
HAHAHA
me: i know
I dial Mike on my hot-pink flip phone, not sure whether I want him to pick up or not. “How weird is that?”
“Well, Barry called me today, said he woke up in the hallway of his dorm. Said he deep-dicked some girl, but he has no idea who.” He laughs, a mucusy exhausted laugh.
“Deep-dicked” will never leave me. It will stay with me long after the sting inside me, like rug burn deep within my body, is gone. After I’ve forgotten the taste of Barry’s bitter spit or the sound of him cursing through the thick glass of my sliding door. Divorced of meaning, it’s a set of sounds that mean shame.
The next week my vagina still hurts. When I walk, when I sit. I thought a hot bath the morning after would cure it, but it’s just getting worse. I’m home on winter break, freezing except for this hot place where nothing will settle down, so I go to my mother’s doctor, the one who delivered my sister. Gently, she examines me and explains it is getting better slowly. It’s like a scrape on your knee, a scab rubbing against jeans.
“It must have been pretty rough,” she says without judgment.
The next semester, after Barry is gone, my friend Melody tells me that once her friend Julia woke up the morning after sex with Barry, and the wall was spattered with blood. Spattered, she said, “like a crime scene.” But he was nice, and he took her for the morning-after pill and named the baby they weren’t having. Julia wasn’t mad. “But you should know,” she says, “that he lost his virginity to a hooker in New Orleans.”
What will I do with this retroactive warning? Just sit on it, what else can I do.
I make a vow not to have sex again until it’s with someone I love. I wait six months, and the next person I do it with becomes my first serious boyfriend, and though he is sexually confused and extremely antisocial he treats me like the eighth wonder of the world and we are best friends.
One afternoon, lying in bed in a way that is only acceptable during college or a deep seasonal depression, I tell him about Barry. I cry, partially from remembering it and partially because I hate the way I’m expressing myself. He’s really hung up on trying to remember whether he ever saw Barry around campus. I’m just angry that I don’t have better words.
Even in the nicest television writers’ room, people say all kinds of terrible things. Confessions of the way we really feel toward our significant others. Stories from our childhoods that our parents wish we had forgotten. Judgments of other people’s bodies. It’s all fodder for A and B stories, motivations, throwaway jokes. I wonder how many loved ones watch TV looking for signs of their own destruction.
We laugh a lot, at things that shouldn’t rightfully be funny—breakups, overdoses, parents explaining their impending divorce to a little kid with chicken pox. That’s the joy of it. One afternoon, I pitch a version of the Barry story. A sexual encounter that no one can classify properly. A condom winding up in a potted plant against the will of the girl being fucked. An Audrey-esque “ambulance chaser” response.
Murray shakes his head. “I just don’t see rape being funny in any situation.”
“Yeah,” Bruce agrees. “It’s a tough one.”
“But that’s the thing,” I say. “No one knows if it’s a rape. It’s, like, a confusing situation that …” I trail off.
“But I’m sorry that happened to you,” Jenni says. “I hate that.”
I tell Jack by accident. We’re talking on the phone about unprotected sex, how it isn’t good for people with our particular temperament, our anxiety like an incorrigible weed. He asks if I’ve had any sex that was “really stressful,” and out the story comes, before I can even consider how to share it. Jack is upset. Angry, though not at me.
I’m crying, even though I don’t want to. It’s not cathartic, or helping me prove my point. I still make joke after joke, but my tears are betraying me, making me appear clear about my pain
when I’m not. Jack is in Belgium. It’s late there, he’s so tired, and I’d rather not be having this conversation this way.
“It isn’t your fault,” he tells me, thinking it’s what I need to hear. “There’s no version of this where it’s your fault.”
I feel like there are fifty ways it’s my fault. I fantasized. I took the big pill and the small pill, stuffed myself with substances to make being out in the world with people my own age a little bit easier. To lessen the space between me and everyone else. I was hungry to be seen. But I also know that at no moment did I consent to being handled that way. I never gave him permission to be rough, to stick himself inside me without a barrier between us. I never gave him permission. In my deepest self I know this, and the knowledge of it has kept me from sinking.
I curl up against the wall, wishing I hadn’t told him. “I love you so much,” he says. “I’m so sorry that happened.”
Then his voice changes, from pity to something sharper.
“I have to tell you something, and I hope you’ll understand.”
“Yes?” I squeak.