by Alice Sebold
On the train ride home my mother’s panic gave way to utter exhaustion. My father picked us up at the station and once we got home, she went immediately to her room. I was glad we were on vacation at school. I would have time to make up a good story.
FOUR
On the day of the rape, I lay across the backseat of the car and tried to sleep while my mother drove. I did so fitfully. The interior of the car was blue, and I pretended I was on the ocean, floating out to sea. But the closer we got to home, the more I thought about my father.
I had learned early that if I interrupted him in his study I had better have something that would dissipate his anger at being disturbed. I often played myself off my more serious sister. I tried to be a bawdy boy for the benefit of a man who lived in a house where he often complained he was “outnumbered by females.” (My father took great joy in their new dog—a poodle mix—openly declaring how good it was to finally have another male in the house.) I wanted to be the child I had always been for my father.
My mother and I pulled into the driveway and walked into the house through the garage.
My father is a tall man and I knew him best as a man obsessed with his work—with editing, writing, and speaking Spanish on the phone with colleagues and friends. But that day he was shaking when I saw him at the end of the long hall in the back entranceway of our house.
“Hey, Dad,” I said.
Mom followed down the long hall. I saw him look quickly up at her and then focus, or try to focus, on me as I advanced.
We hugged each other. We were awkward, ill-fitting.
I don’t remember him saying anything to me. If he did say, “Oh, honey, it’s good to have you home,” or, “Alice, I love you,” it would have been so uncharacteristic that I think I would have remembered it, but perhaps I don’t remember it for that very reason. I did not want new experience. I wanted what I knew, the house I had left that fall for the first time in my life, and the father I recognized.
“How you doing, Dad?” I asked. I had thought of this simple question all the way home.
With flushed relief, he said, “After your mother called, I had five shots of whiskey and I’ve never been more sober in my life.”
I lay down on the couch in the family room. My father, in an effort to stay busy that morning, had prepared some lunch fixings in the kitchen.
“Would you like something to eat?” he asked me.
In my response, I wished to slam-dunk the fact that no one needed to worry about this tough customer.
“That would be nice,” I said, “considering the only thing I’ve had in my mouth in the last twenty-four hours is a cracker and a cock.”
To the outsider this might sound awful; to my father, standing in the doorway of the kitchen, and to my mother, who was fussing with our bags, it both shocked them and meant only one thing: The kid they knew was still there.
“Jesus, Alice,” my father responded. He was waiting there on the precipice for my directions.
“I’m still me, Dad,” I said.
My parents went into the kitchen together. I don’t know how long they spent in there, putting together sandwiches that were, probably, already made. What did they do? Did they hug? I can’t imagine this, but they might have. Did my mother whisper details about the police and my physical condition, or did she promise she would tell him what she knew after I slept?
My sister had made it through finals. The day following my homecoming, when my parents went to pick her up in Philadelphia and pack her things for the summer, I went too.
My face was still bruised. My father drove one car and my mother drove the other. The plan was that I would stay in the car while the three of them loaded my sister’s things. I was only there for my sister to see, so she would know immediately that I was okay. I also went because I didn’t want them alone together and talking about me.
I rode up front with my mother. She preferred to take a local route into the city. It took longer, but we all agreed it was more scenic. Of course the real reason was that the Schuylkill Expressway, known unofficially as the Surekill by those along the Main Line of Philadelphia, was guaranteed to bring on a flap. So we took Route 30, then snaked along various secondary roads toward our ultimate goal of U-Penn.
Over time, the abandoned tracks of the Philadelphia El came to mark the official entrance into the city for me. It was here that pedestrian traffic began, where a man sold papers to drivers from the middle of the road, and a Baptist church played host, year-round, to weddings and funerals whose attendees spread out into the streets in formal clothes.
I had taken this trip many times with my mother. We would meet my father at his office or use the faculty-insurance services through the University of Pennsylvania Hospital. A regular aspect of these trips was my mother’s increasing anxiety as we drew closer and closer to the city. Down Chestnut Street, once past the El, my mother always drove in the middle lane of three lanes on the one-way road. My job was to sit in the passenger seat and anticipate an attack.
The day we went to pick up my sister, the dynamic shifted. Once past the blocks of row houses, alternating block by block in terms of how well maintained they were, the street widened. Abandoned buildings, seedy gas stations, and government brick buildings lined the street. Occasionally, one or two still-standing row houses clung together in the midst of a block.
In the past, on these drives, I had focused on the buildings; I liked the stair notches in the sides of the remaining row houses, seeing them as the fossils of former lives. Now, my focus shifted. So did my mother’s. In the car behind us, I would realize soon, so had my father’s. It shifted to the people on the streets. Not the women, not the children.
It was hot. Hot in the humid, dank way of Northeastern cities during summer. The smell of trash and exhaust fumes seeped through the open windows of our un-air-conditioned car. Our ears perked up at random shouts. We listened for menace in the greetings of friend to friend, and my mother questioned why so many men were clustered at street corners and slouched in front of buildings. This part of Philadelphia, excepting a diminishing Italian population, was black.
We passed a corner where three men stood. Behind them, two older men sat in rickety folding chairs, brought out onto the sidewalk to escape the heat inside their homes. I could sense my mother’s body tense beside me. The bruises and cuts on my face stung. I felt that every man on that street could see me, that every man knew.
“I feel sick,” I said to my mother.
“We’re almost there.”
“It’s weird, Mom,” I said, as I tried to stay calm. I knew the old men hadn’t raped me. I knew the tall black man in a green suit, sitting on a bus-station bench, hadn’t raped me. I was still afraid.
“What’s weird, Alice?” She began to knead her knuckles into her chest.
“How I feel like I’ve lain underneath all these men.”
“That’s ridiculous, Alice.”
We had stopped at a light. When it turned green, we accelerated. But we were going slowly enough so that my eyes lingered on the upcoming corner.
He was there, back from the street and squatting on the cement, leaning against the clean brick of a newish building. I met his eyes. He met mine. “I’ve lain with you,” I said inside my head.
It was an early nuance of a realization that would take years to face. I share my life not with the girls and boys I grew up with, or the students I went to Syracuse with, or even the friends and people I’ve known since. I share my life with my rapist. He is the husband to my fate.
We passed out of that neighborhood and into the world of the University of Pennsylvania, where my sister lived. Doors were open in the houses that rented to students, and U-Hauls and Ryder trucks were double-parked along the curb. Someone had come up with the idea to throw a move-out-day keg party. Tall white boys in muscle tees, or no shirts at all, sat on couches on the sidewalk and drank beer from plastic cups.
My mother and I made our way to my sister’s dorm
and parked.
My father arrived a moment later and parked his car nearby. I stayed in the car. My mother, trying to hide a flap from me, had gotten out and was pacing nearby.
This was what I heard my father say before my mother shot him a warning look.
“Did you see those goddamn animals hanging off of every post and—”
My mother looked quickly at me and then back at my father. “Hush, Bud,” she said.
He came over to me and bent down into the window.
“Are you okay, Alice?”
“I’m fine, Dad,” I said.
He was sweaty and red-faced. Helpless. Afraid. I had never heard him refer to blacks like this, or to any other minority by condemning them as a group.
My father went in to tell my sister we had arrived. I sat in the car with my mother. We didn’t talk. I watched the activities of move-out day. Students used large canvas bins, like those to shuttle mail in the back rooms of post offices, to heap their possessions in. They rolled them across the parking lot to their parents’ cars. Families greeted one another. On a scrubby patch of lawn two boys played Frisbee. Radios blared from the windows of my sister’s dorm. There was freedom and release in the air; summer like an infection, spreading across the campus.
There she was. I saw my sister emerge from the building. I got to watch her walk all the way from the door, which was maybe a hundred feet away, the same distance I was from my rapist when he said, “Hey, girl, tell me your name.”
I remember her leaning down into the car.
“Your face,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“It sure took me long enough,” I joked to her, “but I finally figured out how to wreck your straight A’s.”
“Now, Alice,” my father said, “your sister asked you how you are.”
“I’m getting out of the car,” I said to my mother. “I feel like an idiot.”
My family was uncomfortable with this, but I got out and stood there. I said I wanted to see Mary’s room, see where she lived, help.
I was not hurt badly enough to notice immediately. If you weren’t looking my way, you wouldn’t have known I was different. But as my family and I walked back toward my sister’s dorm, faces at first took in a family like anyone else’s—mother, father, and two girls—but then their eyes lingered, just for a moment, and caught something. My swollen eye, the cuts along my nose and cheek, my bloated lips, the delicate purples of bruises blossoming. As we walked, the stares gathered in number, and I felt them but pretended I didn’t. Beautiful Ivy League boys and girls, brains and nerds, surrounded me. I believed I was doing all this for my family, because they couldn’t deal. But I was doing it for myself as well. We took the elevator up and in it I saw vivid graffiti.
A girl had been gang-raped at a fraternity that year. She had filed a complaint and charges. She was trying to prosecute. But the fraternity members and their friends had made it impossible for her to stay in school. By the time I visited Penn’s campus she had withdrawn. In the elevator of my sister’s dormitory was a crude ballpoint drawing of her with her legs spread open. A group of male figures were waiting in line beside her. The caption read, “Marcie pulls a train.”
I was crammed in the elevator with my family and Penn students going back up for another load. I stood with my face to the wall, staring at the drawing of Marcie. I wondered where she was and what would become of her.
My memories of my family that day are splotchy. I was busy performing, thinking that it was for this that I was loved. But then there were things that hit me too close to the bone. The black man squatting on the sidewalk in West Philadelphia, or the beautiful boys at Penn, throwing a Frisbee, the bright orange disc arcing up and down into my path. I stopped abruptly, and one of the boys ran recklessly to pick it up. As he stood back up, he caught sight of my face. “Shit,” he said, looking at me, stunned for a moment, distracted from the game.
What you have after that is a family. Your sister has a dorm room for you to see. Your mother a panic attack to attend. Your father, well, he’s being ignorant, and you can shoulder the burden of educating him. It is not all blacks, you will begin. These are the things you do instead of collapsing in the bright sun, in front of the beautiful boys, where, rumor has it, Marcie pulled a train.
The four of us drove home. I rode with my father this time. Now I realize that my mother must have been telling my sister everything she knew, the two of them bracing for what might be ahead.
Mary brought her essentials inside the house, and went up to her bedroom to unpack. The idea was that we would all have an informal meal, what my mother called “seek and ye shall find,” and afterward my father would go back into his study to work, and I could spend time with my sister.
But when my mother called for Mary to come down, she didn’t answer. My mother called again. Bellowing family names upstairs from the front hall was common practice for us. Even having to do it several times wasn’t unusual. Finally, my mother went upstairs, only to come back down a few minutes later.
“She’s locked herself in the bathroom,” she told my father and me.
“Whatever for?” my father asked. He was slicing off hunks of provolone and feeding them, slyly, to the dog.
“She’s upset, Bud,” my mother said.
“We’re all upset,” I said. “Why doesn’t she join the party?”
“Alice, I think it would mean a lot if you went up to talk to her.”
I may have grumbled about it, but I went. It was a familiar pattern. Mary would get upset and my mother would ask me to talk to her. I would knock on her bedroom door and sit on the edge of her bed while she lay there. I would do what I called “cheerlead for life,” sometimes rallying her to the point where she would come down for dinner or at least laugh at the obscene jokes I culled for just this purpose.
But that day I also knew that I was the one she needed to see. I wasn’t just the mother-appointed cheerleader; I was the reason why she had locked herself in the bathroom and wouldn’t come out.
Upstairs, I knocked tentatively on the door.
“Mary?”
No answer.
“Mary,” I said, “it’s me. Let me in.”
“Go away.” I could tell she was crying.
Okay,” I said, “let’s deal with this rationally. At some point I’m going to pee and if you won’t let me in I’ll be forced to pee in your bedroom.”
There was silence and then she unlocked the door.
I opened it.
This was the “girls’ bathroom.” The developer had tiled it pink. If boys had moved into the house I can only imagine, but Mary and I managed to work up enough of a hatred of the pink ourselves. Pink sink. Pink tile. Pink tub. Pink walls. There was no relief.
Mary had gone to stand against the wall, between the tub and the toilet, as far away from me as she could.
“Hey,” I said. “What is it?”
I wanted to hold her. I wanted her to hold me.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re doing so well with it. I just don’t know how to act.”
When I moved toward her she moved away.
“Mary,” I said. “I feel like shit.”
“I don’t know how you’re being so strong.” She looked at me, tears on her cheeks.
“It’s okay,” I said to my sister. “It’s all going to be okay.”
Still, she would not let me touch her. She flittered nervously from the shower curtain to the towel rack, like a bird trapped in a cage. I told her I’d be downstairs stuffing my face and that she should join me, and then I closed the door and left.
My sister had always been frailer than I was. At a YMCA day camp when we were kids, they’d passed out badges on the last day. So that every child got one, the counselors made up categories. I got an arts and crafts badge symbolized by a palette and brushes. My sister got the badge for being the quietest camper. On her badge, which they made by hand, they had glued a gray felt mouse. My sister took it on as her symbol, eve
ntually incorporating a small mouse into the tail of the y in her signature.
Back downstairs, my mother and father asked after her. I told them she would be down soon.
“Well, Alice,” my father said, “if it had to happen to one of you, I’m glad it was you and not your sister.”
“Christ, Bud,” my mother said.
“I only meant that of the two of them—”
“I know what you meant, Dad,” I said, and touched my hand to his forearm.
“See, Jane,” he said.
My mother felt that family, or the idea of it, should be uppermost in everyone’s mind during those first few weeks. This was a hard sell to four solitary souls, but that summer I watched more bad television in the company of my family than I have ever seen before or since.
Dinnertime became sacred. My mother, whose kitchen is decorated with pithy signs that, loosely translated, all say, in one form or another, “The Cook Is Out,” made supper every night. I remember my sister attempted to restrain herself from accusing my dad of “smacking.” We were all on our best behavior. I cannot imagine what was going on in their minds. How tired they all probably were. Did they buy my strong-woman act, or just pretend to?
In those first weeks I wore nothing but nightgowns. Lanz nightgowns. Specially bought by my mother and father. My mother might suggest to my father, when he was going out to the grocery, that he stop by and get me a new nightgown. It was a way we could all feel rich, a rational splurge.
So while the rest of the family sat at the dinner table wearing the normal clothes of summer, I sat in my chair wearing a long white nightgown.
I can’t remember how it first came up but, once it did, it took over the conversation.
The topic was the rapist’s weapon. I may have been talking about how the police had found my glasses and the rapist’s knife in the same area out by the brick path.
“You mean he didn’t have the knife in the tunnel?” my father asked.