“He was often very cruel,” she said calmly, as if they were still discussing the movie. “He would berate me, and I would apologize—for things I hadn’t done, that I knew I hadn’t done, or that I knew he’d done, not me—just to get peace. Just to get us back together again. I’d say to myself, How important is this quarrel, anyway? Did I want to end up divorced? To have to be without him,” she said, turning to Janice, seeing the wonder in her eyes as she stared back at her mother, “was unthinkable to me. Beyond unthinkable. And so I’d abase myself for what I thought was the sake of our marriage.” She laughed. “And wound up divorced anyway.”
“My God,” Janice said.
“I was—foolish?” Beth said, frowning, leaning forward in her chair as if she meant to rise. “Or—something,” she said finally It seemed to her that she’d said too much, gone too far with her own daughter, that this kind of thing was better said to priests or psychiatrists. Not that she ever had.
Janice said, “I’ve got an empty spot where Gerry was”—she touched her chest with clasped hands—”and it’s very painful. But it sounds to me like he hollowed you right out. No wonder you can’t get over it.”
Beth wanted to protest that she was over it, had been over it for years; her life was what it was and she would continue to carry her own history quietly, as she had been doing all this time. But when she looked over to her small, dark-haired daughter, appearing now so much like a sleepy child in the toolarge, rumpled bed, she felt only shame that she was so little comfort to her. Surely she knew something; surely she had something to tell her. A truck moaned by, on a street far off from their building, and Beth stirred and sat forward again, conscious of the passage of time, that she had to hurry. The words were coming to her now.
“Soon you will begin to fill that emptiness with friendships,” she said. She’d begun thoughtfully, but her voice began to take on clarity, grew a little louder and more firm. “In a couple of years you’ll be married again, time will pass and you’ll remember Gerry only once in a long while, if you do at all, because you’ll have small children to look after, and a house you and your new husband are filling with things you like, that you choose together. Maybe you’ll be back at work, part-time at least, and your life will be full and rich. Gerry will become merely a tiny part of all that richness. There will be no emptiness at all any more.”
Janice said nothing, her dark eyes fixed on her mother, filled with wonder, perhaps with a tinge of hope. Beth’s voice hung on, scintillating on the thick and still air as if she had spoken from some other world than this small bedroom in this half-emptied apartment in the middle of a city Beth had long ago, for a few lonely years, called home.
On the long bus ride back in the rapidly descending winter twilight Beth remembered her dream about the forest and the man following her. She thought about Duncan and a longing to put away that part of her life forever overcame her and she almost wept, not just for herself, but for Janice and for what seemed to her now the sadness of human life. The bus carried only a few passengers and as the twilight turned to darkness everyone seemed to be drowsing, their heads and shoulders swaying with the bus’s hypnotic motion.
Beth’s dream began to seem real, perhaps by now she was asleep, and she was back in the forest, the thick-trunked, heavy-limbed black trees towering over her, enclosing her, as she moved slowly, searching for a way out. Ahead, glimpsed between foliage-covered branches, she saw a glimmer that she felt sure was a flicker of sunlight shining on a grassy meadow.
She hurried forward, but as she drew nearer to the patch of light, she began to see that instead of a ray reflected from a green, flower-dotted meadow, it came from a wall: tall, solid, impenetrable, extending both directions in the shadowed depths of the forest. She saw that she could not climb over it, that there was no door through it, nor could she go around. For a long time she crouched, trembling, below it, sweat dampening her body, her heart full of terror and longing. Finally, she looked back the way she had come, and beyond that, into the darkest part of the forest, into the trackless wilderness where she had never been. She saw it was a place she had no choice but at last, alone and resolutely, to go.
Random Acts
This is perhaps not a story to tell, she thinks. Then, no, this is perhaps the only story to tell. It’s the story of how she was raped, when she was maybe thirty-one or thirty-two, and how all the bad things that ran wordlessly through her culture about herself and about women as a species flooded over her and she blamed herself and was ashamed and never told anybody till she felt securely beyond her youth.
Not that it helped. By then she had gone too far for rage, too far for thoughts of beatings, castration, murder, or a life lived without men. What she thinks, increasingly, glumly, since that first telling of it, is there was nothing she could have done about it then, and there’s still nothing she can do about it. In fact, she’s just grateful he didn’t break any bones, subduing her easily with his weight and implacability, so that she acquiesced as the only way to avoid being hurt. Nor did he force her to any act of extreme perversion that would have haunted her dreams for the rest of her life. Even her children weren’t in the house, but away, visiting their grandparents. Yes, she thinks, I was very lucky.
Not that she doesn’t see the irony of her conclusion. As far as she knows, she was the only one he followed home that night, she was the only one he raped. But for years she didn’t even call it rape. She didn’t call it anything, she didn’t even think about it. One night she was sitting talking about a mutual friend with a man she’d just met that day, when she heard herself say calmly, conversationally, “That was the night I was raped.”
Since then she’s been thinking about it a lot, going over all the details one by one, as far as she can remember, since it happened twenty-five years before. Stop that, she tells herself. If you doubt each detail as you remember it, you’ll soon doubt that you were raped at all. And she remembers the ugly muscles of his upper arms and the way he pushed her, relentlessly, inexorably, till he was inside the house, then in the bedroom, then lying on the bed on top of her.
She doesn’t understand why she didn’t feel like the woman she’d seen in a television movie who’d been raped and who went a little crazy afterward, took a dozen baths and was afraid to go out at all and then set up a trap for the man, inviting him over, planning to say, “Come in,” when he knocked on her door, and then to blast him with a shotgun. And there were other stories too, in magazines and on radio and television, about women reacting to rape. She’d found them all excessive and self-aggrandizing, reactions of women who couldn’t have been too stable to begin with, who clearly harboured some very bad notions about themselves as sexual beings. For years that was what she thought.
But the older she gets, clutching her secret to herself, the less sure she is that those women were wrong, and that her reaction—to keep silent, not to think about it, to count herself lucky among those who’d been raped—is perhaps the less rational approach after all, and that maybe she is the one who values herself too little, who suffers from an absence of self-esteem and a badly developed sexuality. They’d been outraged at their violation; she hadn’t even been surprised. She’d resisted till she saw resistance was useless, then she’d gone limp till he was done. All those years, whenever it popped into her mind, she’d quickly thought of how she was lucky compared to being a concubine or being forced to commit suttee or being a tribal slave. Even now, when she’s learned to value herself quite a lot, she’s still not outraged and isn’t sure why not.
And, she tells herself, if you never told anybody, you can hardly be the only raped woman who reacted that way. Remember dating when you were a college student? Most dates wound up in wrestling matches. You expected them, there was an unspoken accord: he would try, you would say no, at a certain point you’d either give in or he would realize you meant it and stop. Sometimes he went further than the accord allowed, and if he did, you didn’t go out with him again. It was a dangerous
game, but the only one. Now she thinks that maybe she’d been lucky there too and her girlfriends were being raped and not telling anyone.
Besides, the only reason she didn’t give in was that her mother had told her she shouldn’t, so had the nuns and priests who’d educated her, and her girlfriends, and even the boys who were her friends, counselling her sagely and whispering about girls they all knew who were easy. If you didn’t resist, it was absolutely clear, the life you were being groomed for would be over, and that was a price too high for anybody to pay.
Then, abruptly, when she was in her late twenties and newly divorced, all that ended. Suddenly, making love was socially acceptable, a positive good, everybody was doing it, it was expected. She thinks that probably almost nobody was doing it as much as they implied they were—she, for one, wasn’t—but the point was that you could if you wanted to and nobody would call you a slut or a whore or easy. Nobody would say anything at all.
I never even noticed him, she thinks. A dozen of them together in a club at one big table, her girlfriends, somebody’s husband, a few male friends who were always around, and him, the rapist, a stranger, a house guest of one of the men. They hadn’t even sat close together. When she thought about that night, she remembered he’d sat on the opposite side of the table at the far end, and when she thought harder about it, she’d remembered he’d asked her to dance, that he hadn’t been a good dancer, that they’d danced once, then sat down. She hadn’t even talked to him, and she hadn’t liked him because he was so silent and his silence had a heavy impenetrableness to it that made her wonder why he’d asked her to dance.
The reason she didn’t at first remember dancing with him was that sitting at a table behind them was a man she’d had an affair with and, in a forlorn way, was still in love with. He was sitting with a woman; by the way he was acting she could tell he was in love. When she’d noticed him and smiled and waved, he’d deliberately looked away without even nodding. She’d been so wounded by this unexpected, deliberate, and undeserved slight that all enjoyment was leached from the evening, and after a while, it was barely midnight, she’d gotten up, said goodnight, and left.
But then, she thinks, I do remember that the man I’d danced with stood up when he noticed I was leaving, that as I was walking away he was hastily trying to make change to settle his share of the bill. And I hurried out of the club, and I kept telling myself he wasn’t leaving because of me. And yet, as I passed the shadowed street behind the club, I thought seriously of stepping into it and hiding against a building till he’d gone by. I didn’t, my training to stay on well-lit streets was too strong, and besides, I kept thinking I was imagining things, that he wasn’t going to follow me, or if he was, it was only because my house and the house he was staying in were near each other.
Even now, after all these years, after all the times she’s remembered the details of that night, she can still see the comforting shadows of that narrow side street. She remembers clearly how she hesitated, how close she came to taking those few quick steps that would have saved her, and how she didn’t, telling herself not to be silly, not to be melodramatic.
I never told anyone, she thinks, because if I did, how could I maintain my dignity, my good name, my social standing as a decent woman? I was a divorcée, I was in a nightclub unescorted, I’d had affairs, I’d slept with men I’d just met. I’d violated all the codes I was raised with, had become all the things a dozen years before I’d fought with my dates not to become. This is why for twenty-five years I couldn’t tell this story. Because it was all my fault; I had been asking for it.
Is that why I refused to think about it? she asks herself. Because I couldn’t face that awful truth? That everyone would think I should have expected it, given my lifestyle? That because of it nobody would care? She knows that was part of it: her pride kept her silent, and her stubborn belief in her own strength to endure even the worst that fate might have in store for her.
For all those years she hasn’t allowed herself to think about it, except inadvertently, stopping herself as soon as she noticed she was. Now, her dark secret out in the open at last, she’s driven obsessively to remember it clearly, in every detail. Despite the new climate of opinion, she still suspects it really was her fault, as she’d thought for all these years, something she’d earned, and has no right to be troubled or angry about. She needs to know the truth about it, either to accept the blame or to at last feel the outrage she’s told she has a right to.
No, it’s more than that, she thinks. She’s reached a time when she needs to study her rape from every possible angle in order to at last discover its true meaning; she’s driven to gathering together all the details of her life, every single one. She’s weaving them into a precise tapestry—her finished life—something, when she reaches old age, she’ll be able to glance at with awe and in contentment, everything sorted and in its place, all passions wiped away, everything clearly what it is and nothing more.
She knows that what happened to her was trivial compared to the rapes other women have endured. She wasn’t even really frightened, not at any time during the whole thing. He scared me, the way when I got my key out he stood close to me, and when I tried to slip inside first and shut the door on him, he put his leg in the gap, shoved, and was inside. Then I was scared, she thinks, but not terrified, just scared, because I knew he would try to force me to have sex. I didn’t think beyond that, because he was a close friend of a man I trusted, and I couldn’t believe anybody that man cared about would be capable of anything really bad like maybe—murder. As he pushed his way in, I believe I clung to that thought.
She remembers he put his arms around her and kissed her in the darkness of her living room—I don’t remember anything about that part, she tells herself—and said, “Where’s the bedroom?” He thought it was upstairs and was pushing her toward it and she said, “No, not upstairs,” thinking if he couldn’t find the bedroom she’d be safe, but the moon was so bright and they were at the bottom of the stairs and it was through the open door beside them, they could see the moonlight shining on the satin spread.
She can’t remember exactly about her clothes. She would have been wearing jeans, she doesn’t know how they came off. She remembers his belt buckle hurting her and him raising up to undo it while he kept one forearm across her chest. She fought with him, pushed against him, tried to hold her legs together, to bring her knees up, to shove him away, but it was hopeless. In the one effort when she used all her strength to throw him off, he responded by using his strength to hold her down. She knew when she felt his masculine power that if she didn’t stop fighting him, he not only could hurt her, he would. It seemed the only sensible thing to do was to give in.
Somehow the sex didn’t matter much, not at the time, anyway. It was horrible and disgusting, but it was his action, not hers, so she wasn’t disgusting, he was. That was what she was thinking as it happened, that it wasn’t much, it wasn’t anything. After, she pretended she was asleep. He pushed her a bit or something, she doesn’t clearly remember what, and then he just left. Got up, pulled on his pants, walked out.
She remembers how the second she heard the door shut she leaped off the bed and locked it. She doesn’t know if she saw this through the window or if she imagined it, but she sees him hesitate and look over his shoulder when he hears the bolt snap shut. As if it just occurred to him she might be mad at him or afraid of him, as if up to that moment it never occurred to him that she had any feelings at all. Or maybe she was going to call the police. She remembers she thought of them for only one brief instant, shuddering at what they might say to her. No, she never seriously considered the police, but she thinks at that moment it might have crossed his mind, and for an instant he was afraid.
Then I just walked around the house in the dark, she remembers, didn’t even put on any lights. Just walked around from room to room and looked out the windows at the moonlight. And I felt so bad. I felt that life was too awful to want to live. That I wasn’
t loved by anyone, that I wasn’t—I was going to say, fit to live, she thinks, but that sounds like all those women on TV and radio and in magazines who are so excessive. Anyway, it wasn’t quite like that.
I was fighting this terrible sense of loss and the ugliness of life. I would never recover from this because I had been so defiled, and all the things I’d believed in, all the things I’d tried to be, one silent, well-muscled stranger could destroy in a minute. Could make me feel I was a fool, and alien, too, to the loving, clean world I was raised in because I was so bad, so guilty, so big a liar about myself.
Yet, as well as she can remember, she didn’t think of suicide. Instead, she’d been plunged down into an echoing underworld whose very air was made of something more resonant and more meaningful than mere pain, and the place was so far down and so dark she couldn’t pull herself out of it, couldn’t even think of escaping, couldn’t think at all. Now she sees it was the place that at bottom holds death, and she sees she’d been aware of it then, but beyond action of any kind.
This is why she feels no outrage, only this bottomless, unending sorrow whenever she thinks of it. That he had no right was never in question, but—if only she could hold onto that glimmer she sometimes catches of some greater wisdom that might tell her what she really wonders: why so small a thing, that didn’t even leave a bruise, made her feel so bad.
Eventually she must have simply gone to sleep. The next day she got up and went to work and looked after her children when they returned from visiting their grandparents, and kept on going to work and doing all the things she was supposed to do—doing them badly sometimes, fitfully, failing as often as she succeeded, being an ordinary, normal human being, she supposes, and didn’t even try to kill herself.
Real Life Page 6