‘Yes,’ she whispered, ‘someone I no longer am.’
She got dressed, paid for the bathing suit and left the store with Bart. He held her hand and walked quickly as if he was afraid she would change her mind. They were practically running.
‘I didn’t steal it,’ she said.
‘What?’ He paused. ‘Oh. Sorry. My mind was flying ahead, going over the things I had to do when we get to the lake. I don’t remember if I filled the tank last time. No big deal. The pump’s right nearby. And I thought we’d get some sandwiches and sodas or beers, if you want, at the diner on the way. You know, Top’s Diner?’
‘I’ve driven past it but never eaten there.’
‘It’s good,’ he said and reached for the car door. ‘I’ve got sun tan oil on the boat,’ he told her.
She sat back. He seemed to have everything under control. It felt good to put herself in the hands of someone else – a man in particular. It wasn’t that she craved dependence, but she was always so nervous and concerned about every detail involved with everything she did, especially when she came home. To be just along for the ride and not have to plan anything was something she hadn’t done since she was a little girl going somewhere with her parents.
Bart was doing most of the talking today, sounding almost as nervous as he had on their way to Dante’s last night. He talked about when he bought the boat, how he had always wanted one, how he took care of it and how lucky he was to be able to do that. Engines of all kinds, he explained, had fascinated him as a little boy. He liked to hang out with the mechanics when he was a kid and watch them at work. Most enjoyed him being there and his questions, but there were grouchy ones, too, he explained.
‘At least I was out of my father’s hair when I went with him to work. Back then, we kept the service department opened on Saturdays. I was with him whenever there was a school holiday, too.’
‘What about your mother?’
‘My mother?’
‘Did she like that you were so occupied in the garage?’
‘Oh yeah, but in the early days, my mother was at the dealership more, too. She was good at selling a vehicle to other women, pointing out things women would appreciate.’
‘But she doesn’t do that anymore?’
He winced. They had still not discussed coming upon his father. He liked that she wasn’t bringing it up, but he knew it would hang out there and could not be ignored forever. Perhaps, after all that had happened to her and all she had gone through, she was much better at ignoring unpleasant things.
‘No. Things changed when cars became a lot more involved,’ he said.
They pulled into the parking lot for Top’s Diner.
‘Let’s see what the special sandwiches are today,’ he said.
She got out with him and entered. Suddenly, he paused as if there was an invisible wall in front of them. She heard him say ‘Shit’ under his breath.
He reached for her arm at the elbow and moved them quickly to the counter. The abruptness of his movements and the discernable change in his mood brought an unexpected feeling of trepidation. Because he was keeping his attention fixed forward, studying the chalk writing on the blackboard menu, she did the same.
They both decided on the fresh turkey. He ordered some sodas and chips as well. She noted that while the sandwiches were being prepared, he turned to pick up a copy of the Sullivan County Democrat and gazed at the lead stories. She sensed he wasn’t as interested in that as he was in narrowing his view of the diner. She turned and looked to her right.
Top’s Diner was classic 1950s style with its black-and-red checkered floor, its chrome, black vinyl counter stools, and its red faux-leather booths with jukeboxes on the sides for patrons to choose their favorite old and recent tunes. The kitchen walls were all silver metal siding and the grill was open. The waitresses wore pink-and-white dresses with black trim and Top’s Diner logo over their right breasts. They were all wearing black-and-white saddle shoes as well.
She panned the long room with its oversized windows on the right and paused when she saw three boys in a booth second from the end. She recognized the man facing them. Marvin Hacker. The other two boys had their backs to them. She glanced at Bart again as he lifted his eyes from the paper.
‘That’s Marvin Hacker looking at us. He was in your class, wasn’t he?’ she asked.
He looked and nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘His brother Louis was killed in Vietnam early this year.’
‘Oh. I didn’t know. They were twins,’ she said, as if she believed when one twin died, the other had to and it was odd that Marvin was still alive.
‘Marvin enlisted right out of high school and got out after three years. Louis was drafted,’ Bart said. ‘His father passed away last month. They still have their garage, but it’s nothing like it was. I get a lot of their dissatisfied customers,’ he muttered.
She looked back at him. He seemed to be staring, but he made no attempt to greet them. He’s probably angry at Bart for stealing away his customers, she thought.
Bart paid for their food and drinks and scooped up the bag.
‘OK?’ he said. ‘Anything else? Candy?’
‘No, this is fine. Thank you.’
They started out. Bart didn’t turn around to look again at Marvin. He seemed to want to leave quickly, too.
It’s probably uncomfortable for him, she thought and kept his pace.
Less than a minute later, they were backing out of the parking space.
She looked toward the diner.
Marvin Hacker was staring out at them.
His face looked chiseled in granite, his eyes very dark – almost two holes full of ink. He looked angry. For a moment, she felt sorry for him having lost his brother and now his father. He was understandably bitter. It was impossible to go through life without some deep wounds.
The choice was simple: wail about it and layer on the self-pity or follow Nietzsche’s advice and believe that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
I don’t want to be pitied anymore, she thought, but I’m not stronger. Not yet.
And it’s still up for grabs whether or not I will ever be.
TEN
Nobody still going to school wanted to rush the summer. Even those attending college wished days were thirty-six or forty-eight hours long instead of twenty-four. But probably no one wanted time to stand still as much as Victoria did that horrible summer. She dreaded the idea of walking into her high school after Labor Day. She had nightmares about it. In all of them, everyone was looking at her and whispering, and everyone else’s eyes were twice the size. Even the teachers were standing in doorways and looking and whispering. In some dreams, all the boys were gazing at her licentiously, as though what had happened to her pulled back some blanket or opened some door and left her sexually vulnerable, easy pickings.
She woke in a sweat, battling back the urge to scream, her body trembling. If she had been hit by a car, broken an arm or a leg falling off her bike or had simply been seriously ill for a few weeks, she would be swimming in sympathy. Storekeepers would have given her little gifts. Her friends would have called frequently and visited. Why was the violation and abuse of a young woman treated so differently … or so indifferently?
She found herself in a prison of her own making. During the remainder of summer, she had left the house solely to go to see her therapist. Jena constantly tried to get her to do things with her, but she was always too tired or had a headache. Eventually, Jena stopped asking and even reduced her visits for a while. Victoria didn’t blame her, and always accepted and went along with her obviously phony reasons for the longer intervals.
Nevertheless, Victoria welcomed her visits, however infrequent, because they were essentially her only connection with the world she knew. After some initial phone calls from other friends who seemed to call more out of obligation or sick curiosity, her phone was as good as dead. She never even called Jena.
She met with Lieutenant Marcus two more ti
mes before school began, and it was clear from the policewoman’s questions and the way she responded to Victoria’s mother that little headway had been made with the investigation. On the last occasion, her mother was interrogating Lieutenant Marcus more than Lieutenant Marcus had interrogated Victoria.
‘How many boys have you questioned? Do you have any suspects at all? Why don’t you have more help? How is the local police department assisting? How long will you be on this case? Have you found any evidence at all? Are the city boys completely exonerated? Summer’s ending. How will you pursue any leads involving them? What else are you working on? Is this a priority? Were you given this investigation as some form of punishment?’
It got so that Victoria actually felt sorry for Lieutenant Marcus. As soon as she answered one question, she had to fend off another.
Her mother assured her – threatened her, actually – that she would go to the highest authority to get some results soon. ‘It’s not just for us. It’s for this whole community,’ she nearly shouted. ‘Whose daughter can feel safe now?’
‘I understand,’ Lieutenant Marcus kept saying.
‘Do you?’ her mother finally said, her frustration palpable. ‘I doubt it.’ The way she said that made it clear she didn’t think Lieutenant Marcus could sense or identify with a female’s pain.
That seemed to put the seal on the discussion. The police officer left and never returned. When her mother inquired, she was told the findings were being given to the local police department to follow up, which, to Victoria’s mother, was as good as saying, ‘Don’t stay up for results.’
The problem with not identifying and prosecuting the villains wasn’t so much that justice wouldn’t be served or revenge satisfied. For Victoria, it meant that she would never know if the boys looking at her, even talking to her, were the ones who had violated her. Naturally, that made her shy away from any attention, any conversations and certainly any romantic approaches in her remaining time at high school.
She told Dr Thornton that she felt as though her girlfriends believed that any association with her endangered them the way someone with a potentially deadly disease might. It was as if being raped was catching. More than one of her girlfriends asked her if she had suffered any sexually transmitted disease.
‘We know that would be something only your doctor and parents would know, but you can tell me.’
No matter how she denied it, rumors spread that she had indeed contracted syphilis and had to be treated for that in the hospital as well.
The details of the attack were public knowledge now. At first, she accused Jena of spreading the information she had told her, but after a while she realized the interrogations led to conclusions and that someone in the local police department was leaking specifics. There was a big uproar in the school before Christmas that year when she found an ugly, nasty note in her locker. Someone had drawn a very graphic picture of her with a sack over her head and her legs spread. Her parents met with the principal and the police chief, Hal Donald. Her mother insisted that every student’s fingerprints be taken, but, as it turned out, whoever had done it must have handled the paper with gloves. There were no discernable prints. The art teacher, Bob Dungan, was brought in to analyze the drawing to see if he could match it with the work of any of his students. The drawing was crude, so he didn’t feel confident enough with his suspicions to offer any names.
The terror associated with talking to any of the boys, her now being afraid even to go to her locker, her grades suffering and her withdrawal from anything remotely social were turning Victoria into something of a pariah in the school. Slowly, she slipped further and further down to the realm of invisibility, like someone trying to go up a hill of ice. Many of the parents of other young girls were telling each other that Victoria Myers must have been hanging out with some very undesirable types. The emphasis shifted back to suspecting some city boys. City boys, by their very nature, were more exposed to such ugly events. Everyone knew that people were murdered, robbed and raped daily in the city. It had to be them and Victoria brought it on herself by having anything to do with them.
This idea made it difficult for any local girl to get romantically involved with a city boy the following summer and even the one after, and Victoria sensed that these frustrated girls blamed her. The unsolved sexual attack gradually took on legendary characteristics. When the story was told months and even years after, it was often embellished. It was a gang rape. There were more than two. She had agreed to let them walk her home … she was drunk … she was high on pot. Witnesses saw her half naked on the beach at the lake. On and on, the exaggerations built until there was no hope of ever returning to the actual event and facts.
For a while, Helen and Lester Myers toyed with the idea of sending Victoria to a private school. Dr Thornton wasn’t in favor of that. She told them, ‘Once you enable her to avoid reality, send her off as if she is the guilty party here, she’ll drop further and further into withdrawal. More important, she might interpret it as assigning her guilt. Let’s help her deal with it all here. She’ll get stronger and that strength will help her when it’s time to move on.’
All along, Lester Myers believed his daughter was too fragile to be sent away anyway and he grabbed on to Dr Thornton’s logic. Helen relented, too, and the idea drifted away. Victoria did start to take baby steps and go places with Jena. Occasionally, one or two of her other friends from before the Incident invited her to something, and then there was her date to the senior prom as well as her gradual return to being an A-plus student. She continued to avoid any extracurricular activities and that was what solidified her association with Jena. They hung about with other outsiders who did little or nothing when it came to sports, plays and clubs. Victoria’s grades were good enough to get most of the colleges to overlook this and she was accepted by four.
At first, her mother didn’t want her to attend a college in New York City. The negatives of the city world were still quite compelling. Helen Myers had gone to Vassar, a school she believed was far more insulated. It was located in Poughkeepsie, and Poughkeepsie was more like a neighborhood than a city when one compared it with New York. Victoria did not want to apply to Vassar. She harbored the fear that everything she did there would pale in comparison with her mother’s achievements. To her credit, Helen Myers did not push it. Victoria didn’t know, but Dr Thornton had suggested the reason to her mother and emphasized that Victoria should go out on her own.
The summer before she left, her friend Jena suggested that they walk that old shortcut from the village to Victoria’s house and they do it at night. She had, unbeknownst to Victoria, been doing research on rape victims. In fact, she had used the topic for her college admissions essay.
‘It’s a matter of confronting the demons that are in your subconscious,’ she recited, quoting a psychology magazine and the author of the article, who had a trail of degrees as long as your arm.
The truth was that Victoria had herself toyed with this idea. More than once, in fact, she set out to do it, but fear of what it might do to the little progress she thought she had made stopped her.
‘We’ll start out from the same place you started that night,’ Jena explained. ‘We’ll go slowly, and once you get through it, it won’t have the same terrible meaning for you ever.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Don’t you see? It’s symbolic now. It’s bigger than life. You’ve got to turn it and everything associated with it back to what it normally is. That’s an exact quote.’
‘The idea frightens me. I can’t help it.’
‘I’ll be right by your side,’ Jena insisted. Victoria couldn’t recall her looking more excited about anything. She really is living some exciting adventure through me, Victoria thought. She almost laughed about it. ‘Well?’ Jena pressed. ‘Shall we try to conquer this?’
‘We?’
‘Well, it’s a little scary for me, too. I mean, I don’t think this will happen, but what if you freak out o
r something? I’ll get into a lot of trouble going along with you or urging you to have done it.’
‘I don’t know. You might be blowing it out of all proportion. It might not be that important anyway. Who cares about the shortcut?’
Jena’s face of excitement seemed to lose air.
‘On the other hand, I won’t deny it’s something I’ve thought of doing.’
‘Right. That’s natural. Deep inside, you want to conquer all these fears. It will help you heal.’
‘OK. But maybe we shouldn’t do it at night.’
‘Oh, you have to duplicate the incident as closely as you can,’ Jena insisted. ‘That’s what I read.’
‘The Incident?’
‘That’s what I heard your mother call it once, and I don’t want to say “rape”.’
‘We’ll do it tonight,’ Victoria said. An impulsive decision was best. If she sat around considering it, she would never do it. She already knew that from her own toying with the idea.
Jena was driving now, something Victoria wasn’t doing as much as she could. With her father’s help, she had gotten her driver’s license, and whenever he could, he let her do the driving, but without much incentive in terms of places to go, others to visit, parties or even going to school sporting events, Victoria just didn’t push to do more driving as did most everyone else in her class. Some even had their parents buy them their own vehicle – mostly used cars, but nevertheless their own.
‘OK. I’ll come by at seven. We’ll say we’re just taking a ride to meet some friends to get a soda or something.’
‘Just taking a ride is enough. My parents will be happy to see me go out,’ Victoria said. ‘No need to elaborate and lie.’
‘Right. Whatever you say,’ Jena replied. She was on fire with her idea.
The Incident Page 13