Winter break was approaching and Lucas talked about taking us someplace warm, Indonesia maybe. I told him to travel with his classmates, I couldn’t leave until a court date was set, plus I needed to save my money. If we go and have to come back, we’ll come back, he said. I imagined us on a moped along a dirt road beneath the mottled light of banana trees, receiving a notification the trial was back on, the warmth of the dream vanishing.
For a long time I told myself I was not allowed pleasure. I began calling all the things I’d hoped to do sugar-cube ideas. The court case was a pot of hot water that quickly dissolved all semblance of a regular life. During the month I’d been home, I’d applied for a few administrative jobs, but when they replied I was already in Philly.
It had almost been a year since the assault, but I found myself exactly where I’d started. An anniversary for a couple celebrates a year together, a birthday marks a year of growth. The anniversary of the assault marked a year of treading water. At the trial, we’d start all over again.
Trauma was refusing to adhere to any schedule, didn’t seem to align itself with time. Some days it was distant as a star and other days it could wholly engulf me.
I’d expected the legal process to be composed of a back-to-back sequence of dramatic court scenes. Nobody had warned me about the waiting, the floating formless months in between, the way it demanded all of you, then none of you. It seemed impossible that in this year I had only spent a single day testifying in court, while around that day my life had disintegrated. It had taken me nine months to process, a few weeks to prepare, a day to testify, all this time to restore, and we had yet to get into the meat of it.
I finally received an update, but it was not one I was expecting. My advocate called to tell me she’d received a job as a counselor at a university and would be moving away. I would be assigned a new advocate, someone she trusted. She was calling to say good-bye, say she was proud of me, and would be rooting me on. After we hung up, I was hit by a moment of sadness, reminded that in life, people moved on. That’s what you do, that’s what was supposed to happen.
My DA was also reassigned to a new department. When she called to tell me this, my mind drifted away from the conversation, until I heard her say she’d asked to keep my case, to see it through to the end. I remained quiet, shaken by the idea that if she hadn’t made it a point to stay with me, I would have been handed off to a new attorney, a new advocate.
Had they both left I imagine it would have been hard to keep myself committed. Why would I continue? At this point, who was I doing this for? Me? If this was for me, then why was I sitting on a bed alone, unemployed, in an unfamiliar city. We were fighting for closure, for justice. It was not for me, but at the expense of me, that we’d be able to get there.
Lucas bought the tickets for January 1, 2016. The idea of Indonesia still seemed abstract, too far away to grasp, but the ticket itself offered me a little hope. Even victims go to Indonesia. Victims have sun on their skin. He kept reminding me I was a person who deserved life.
Every morning, when Lucas left for class, I’d feel his lips briefly press into my forehead. Next I’d hear the click of the door, the signal that for the next eight to ten hours there would be silence. I would get up, stare at myself in the mirror while brushing my teeth for ten minutes, sit on the couch wrapped in a bedsheet, put my pants on, put them away again, and crawl back into bed. Occasionally I’d hear Lucas’s roommate come in, use the kitchen sink, flip on the television. Even more reason to burrow deeper into bed, making no sound, erasing my existence. In the afternoons I would go up to the roof of the building to read, watching people on adjacent balconies take smoke breaks. Sometimes I would slip on clean clothes ten minutes before Lucas arrived home, to suggest I might have left the apartment, gone out, done something. But often this was not the case.
The lounging may have looked like laziness. But the days didn’t feel like Sunday afternoons. The parts of my mind I’d left untouched for so long had been awoken; the jars I’d stored away in January uncapped, broken, contents released. I remembered all the days I’d spent in the office, counting down the hours until I could return to bed. Now I’d successfully rid myself of work, could lie in bed uninterrupted, but that freedom came with emptiness.
For one hour a week I saw my therapist, a contained realm where I could talk about what was on my mind. But outside that hour I preferred silence or easy conversation. If Lucas brought up the case, I grew agitated. Why would you even ask me that? I corralled all of our conversations into the realm of normal life; deciding where to go to dinner, if we should take a jog to the river. I wanted easy decisions, situations I could manage.
Every now and then, Claire Skyped me from France. My day was her night and she whispered, careful not to wake the kids she had tried so hard to put to sleep. She wore bright pink headphones in her windowless bedroom. I called her the little DJ in the dungeon. She told me about learning to drive a stick shift, a toddler’s diarrhea that dripped into socks, the kids and their silk pajamas. I told her about my fear of lawyers, the relief of cool nights in Philly. If I was miserable, I told her I was miserable. She did not say, Really? Or, I can’t imagine. That must be hard. How unusual. She just nodded, verified. Strangely it made me feel right on track. She too had visited these emotional landmarks. Even though she was thousands of miles away, it was a comfort having one person in the world fully aware of me, who still told me funny stories, who didn’t treat me any differently.
One morning, lying in bed, I noticed a little clump of my hair in the carpet. Then I noticed one strand curled around the leg of the couch. I picked it up and it lead me to some dust on the floor, lining the baseboards of each wall. Soon I was on my knees with a roll of paper towels going over every inch of the apartment. The silverware drawer was rid of plastic sporks and soy sauce packets, the paper take-out menus alphabetized. I stuffed trash bags into the metal trash chute at the end of the hall, like Santa’s sack down a chimney. This was all very satisfying. By the time Lucas came home, I was red faced and shimmering, and he was stunned, everything polished and citrus scented. Wow, you didn’t have to do that, he said. I did, I said. It was the first anything I’d done in weeks.
The next day there were no dishes to wash, no counters to wipe. I had to make the dishes dirty. I’d grown up coming home to my mom sitting at the dinner table surrounded by twelve women making dumplings, their hands fluttering to produce mountainous piles of doughy delicacies. I never participated, just sat in my room as bowl after bowl was delivered while I did my homework. Now I walked to Chinatown and back again, my arms looped with plastic bags sprouting long green chives and pink ground pork sealed in plastic. Usually I avoided raw meat, unnerved by touching the wet insides of animals. But I was chopping the chives into tiny green circles, sprinkling them into the flesh, dipping my finger in water and tracing the crescent rim of each circular coaster of dough, plucking a morsel of meat to place in the center, sealing them into soft pouches. I didn’t have a factory line of women, but I sat humming to myself, hunched over the counter, making over two hundred. My loneliness was turning into something edible, something nourishing, something good when dipped in chili pepper and soy sauce.
Having two mouths instead of just my own to feed was enough motivation. Every day, I would rip off a blank sheet of paper, write down a recipe, tuck it into my purse, go collect the required vegetables and meats and spices. It was over stir-fry that Lucas told me he was going to a rugby tournament for three days. Just three days, he said. Three whole days? I said, shifting the bell peppers around the pan. Seventy-two uninterrupted hours could bring me down quickly. I needed to be taken out of my own head. Coffee shops would not be enough.
I found a coupon online for a twenty-dollar haircut. On the day he left, I walked through a construction site up the stairs into a room with bamboo plants and plastic washing bins, a small statue of Buddha flanked by tangerines. Just a trim, I said, whic
h is easier to say than, I’m here because I need to talk to humans, I need you to gently touch my head. I missed my mom’s soft hands, the feeling of her care. My neck was craned back. The woman had black bangs and wore an orange apron. She cradled my head beneath a hot stream of water, my hair wet and heavy and full of lavender. I asked her questions about her life and each one of her answers pulled me a little up out of myself, her worries, her relationships, her pregnancy, her bunnies, one which happened to be named Tiffany. She guessed I was Thai, I said I was half Chinese. I’m from California, yes the beach is nice, but the water’s actually quite cold. The day was saved.
Day two. I had never gotten my eyebrows done. Another tiny salon, mirrors bordered with plastic cherry blossoms, a small glittery fountain on the counter. I sat in a line of ladies in chairs along the wall. Sorry for the wait. No worries, I said. I meant it, I had nowhere to be. When it was my turn, I reclined into another woman’s soft hands.
Day three. Fingernails, fifteen dollars. It was raining. I scanned the wall of colorful glass orbs, choosing orange. My large hand looked like a dead pancake held by the woman’s nimble fingers. I was warm inside the glowing salon, the sidewalks dark and wet outside. The girl next to me was celebrating, had just gotten a job at Applebee’s. Everything’s starting to go right, she’d said.
Lucas returned, and my hair was smooth, my nails the color of traffic cones. I fell back into my self-made rhythms and routines. One afternoon, I was on the floor next to the laundry machine, trying to figure out which compartment I was supposed to pour the bleach into, when I paused. What am I doing.
I had become the little cleaner fish, he the whale. We both enjoyed and benefited from each other, but the difference was that he was a majestic creature in his element, and I was tiny as a minnow. He was getting a master’s degree and I was picking lint out of the dryer.
Lucas had mentioned a comedy club on campus, run by his rugby teammate Vince. One evening as Lucas was going out the door, he invited me to join. At the first meeting, there were about fifteen guys and two women sitting at a round table. Everyone was pitching ideas, revising jokes about the pope’s upcoming visit, cheese hoagies. The atmosphere was loose and forgiving. I sat in my black snow coat, wound up and silent, my chair slightly tucked behind his, observing.
After the second meeting, Lucas and I walked home across the bridge and ran into one of his rugby teammates. Where you guys coming from? he asked. Comedy club, Lucas said. We might try out for the show, I said. Nice! said the friend. Wait, you? He turned to me and cocked his head, as if I’d told him I was going to the moon. Instinctively I shrugged my shoulders, quickly adding a small shake of my head to sweep the idea away. And he nodded as if to say, right. It was subtle, but his toe had slid over the line. He had not been aware of my one rule: I decide what I am capable of. Whenever I am underestimated, I think, you mistake my quietness for weakness. If you can’t imagine me on a stage, I’ll get on one.
The next morning, I got out of bed as soon as Lucas left. I sat on the couch and wrote about everything I didn’t understand about B-school, all the conversations I had quietly listened to. How I mistook Ali Baba for a character from Aladdin. How it turns out the guy in P. E. does not, in fact, teach physical education. How when Lucas asked me if I knew what microfinance was, I said, Yes, tiny finance. I contemplated my newly acquired role as a “partner,” the label given to significant others. The way partners stared out the window like cats waiting for their owners to come home. I pointed out that what they considered a signing bonus was more than my actual salary. I detailed the ways I struggled to pronounce the Schuylkill River. I read it aloud to myself in the bathroom, laying each word down like a brick, until I memorized ten minutes of material.
On the day of the audition, I walked alone to campus, across the bridge, all the while speaking quietly to myself. Lucas had drawn me a little map. I arrived at Huntsman Hall an hour early, shutting myself inside a bathroom stall, reciting my routine. When it was time, I rode the escalators down, scanned the doors for the right room number. The two presidents of the club, Vince and Liz, sat with hands clasped. I closed the door, set my backpack on the floor. I spoke slowly from memory, watched their eyes enlarge at times, a laugh spilling here and there. Smiling wide, they said, Thank you, we’ll be in touch. I nodded and left. If I don’t get it, it’s okay, I thought.
Two days later the email surfaced in my in-box. The lineup had been released. I scanned the names, the jumbles of letters, trying to locate mine. I found it at the bottom: I was one of two females among eight males, the only nonstudent, and they had saved my act for last. I was going to close. I remember inhaling and clenching my fists, making running motions with my feet, swiveling in my chair, and opening my mouth as if to tell someone, turning back to the screen remembering no one was there. Look where they put me. If they had given me the challenge to top off the show, they must believe I was going to succeed. My nerves shot up in flames, but for the first time in nine months, anxiety did not cause me to shrivel up and shut down. It fueled me to begin.
We rehearsed in the evenings at an apartment near the river. Some people arrived late from class or buttoned up in a tie coming from an interview. I was always early, freshly showered, my material prepared, my backpack empty except for my comedy notes; this was not my fun thing on the side. We took turns holding the TV remote as a microphone, butchering delivery, tweaking and repeating jokes until we’d memorized each other’s sets. For a few hours in the night we lived in the world of the absurd, where every hardship translated into material. A small part of me waited for a tasteless rape joke to emerge, prepared to conceal a flinch, knowing I wouldn’t voice discomfort for fear of becoming the sensitive one. But a rape joke never arrived. Instead we talked about hairless cats and told Vince it wasn’t funny he saw a June bug in July.
One night, our meeting glided past midnight. We left as a group and shuffled through the cold, discussing the highlighted flops of the evening. At every intersection, one or two people peeled off to go home. It slowly occurred to me that I lived the farthest away. The group dwindled, my steps accompanied by fewer feet. I remembered a song at summer camp, singing as friends flapped their arms and flew away one by one, until I was left standing alone; only one short neck buzzard, I said one short neck buzzard, sitting in a dead tree.
I began planning; I would stop in the bright cone of a streetlight as soon as the last guy veered off. I would call Lucas to come and get me. But what if he was already sleeping? I would run. I looked to see if the rest of the street was well lit, if there were people around to be my witnesses. All the stores were closed. I scanned the sidewalks, evaluated which route to take to avoid cutting through the park. If I needed help, I could run to the CVS two streets over. There’d be people there. But I could already hear the questions: What was she doing alone at night? Why didn’t she just ask someone to accompany her? Where was she coming from? Comedy? Is she even funny? How many beers did she have? What are her jokes about? Where was her boyfriend? Is there a call log? What was she wearing? The voices had amplified since the hearing, unfurling endlessly in my head, so maddening I didn’t realize the final guy had stopped walking.
I’m that way, he said. Are you sure you’re going to be okay walking home? I can walk with you. I looked at him, a little stunned; for a second I thought I may have been speaking out loud, my face contorted and exasperated without me realizing. I wondered if he was only asking out of politeness and really wanted to get home. But he stood patiently, shrugging his shoulders up in asking. Happy to, he said. And like that the voices dispersed, scuttling back into the shadows, and the two of us walked down a regular sidewalk on a regular street on a regular night in Philly.
There were many subtle moments like this where I paused to look the person in the eye in an attempt to say, If only you knew how much this meant to me. A small gesture, just remembering my name, or asking if I needed a little assistance, felt like warmth
on my skin when I spent most of my time being numb. The custodian of my building, Anthony, was always refilling the hot cocoa machine on the fifth floor because he knew I drank two cups in the evenings. The Korean mother who worked at Sue’s Market, oval bun and tiny round glasses, would look up and smile when I came in and say, Hi, Chanel, everything okay? Haven’t seen you in a few days. And the three doorwomen, Alicia, Khadijah, Joda, who circulated at the front desk of my building, twenty-four hours a day. When it was quiet in the lobby, I’d ride the elevator down in my slippers with two coconut popsicles, to spend a couple of hours conversing. They were the ones always telling Lucas to take me to dinner or yelling at him if they saw me carrying too many groceries. I watched them stay calm when people accused them of mishandling food deliveries, blamed them for late packages, a drunk man telling one that he liked her hair better longer, why’d she have to cut it? I watched them respond in level tones, even when they had every right to be angry, their shoulders held back, a skill I took note of for my testimony. And finally there was the comedy crew, who made sure I got home safely in the evenings. These were the pockets of the world where I was regrowing. They called me Chanel, not Brock Turner’s victim, not Lucas’s girlfriend. Just Chanel.
The day of the show I was too nervous to eat, too deep inside my head to make conversation. I told everyone at Sue’s Market and the employees in the building that I was performing at Helium Comedy Club and they wished me luck, asking me to record videos for them to watch. There would be two shows, at 7:00 P.M. and 10:00, hundreds of tickets sold out, a packed house. When deciding what to wear, I came across the oatmeal sweater I’d worn in court. I threw it on with a pair of jeans. I had spent all my time trying to bury Emily, to forget and repress her. Now I wanted to show myself that the one crying in court was the same one who would be funny onstage. Both existed in me.
Know My Name Page 14