by Alice Sebold
Mary Alice’s roommate was what we called experienced. She was from Brooklyn. Her name was Debbie and her nickname was Double D. She smoked and thought little of us. She had a from-home boyfriend who was older. And I mean older. Early forties, but with the agelessness of Joey Ramone. He was a DJ somewhere and had a deep smoker’s voice. When he visited, they went to hotels and Debbie returned to the dorm with her cheeks flushed and clearly, again, disgusted by us. Mary Alice had long toes and would feed me crackers by digging them into the box. We dressed up in stupid outfits and, with coupons from cocoa mix, sent away for a real Swiss Miss cardboard chalet.
Debbie began two-timing her boyfriend with a male cheerleader from school. Her new boyfriend’s name was Harry Weiner and of course Mary Alice and I had endless fun with that. Once, on a dare, I hid inside the Swiss Miss chalet while Debbie and Harry went at it on the bed. At a certain point, dare or no, I felt too uncomfortable and crawled, on my hands and knees, with the cardboard chalet moving with me like some sort of cartoon spy’s camouflage, over to the door to make my escape.
Debbie was incensed. She put in for a room transfer. Mary Alice never stopped thanking me.
Within a few weeks of the start of freshman year, a group of girls gathered in the hall outside our rooms. We sat on the floor, with our backs against the walls, our legs outstretched or Indian-style. The former homecoming queens or future flirts tucked their legs to one side, while the jocks on scholarship, like my friend Linda, didn’t think twice about how they sat or looked while surrounded by their peers. Slowly the stories came out—who was and wasn’t a virgin.
Some were obvious. Like Sara, who sold hash out of her black-lit room, where she had a stereo system that cost more than most of our fathers’ cars, on which she played the classic stoner tracks of Traffic and Led Zep. “Some guy’s in there,” her assigned roommate would say, and we would throw this girl a sleeping bag and tell her not to snore.
Then there was Chippie. I had never heard the word before. Didn’t know it meant whore. Thought it actually was her name, and innocently said, “Hi, Chippie, how are you?” on the way to the showers one morning. She burst into tears and never talked to me again.
There was also a girl who was a sophomore and lived at the end of the hall. She dated a townie and modeled for Joel Belfast, a semi-famous painter in the art department. The townie liked to chain her up to her bunk bed and we would see her leather and ultrasuede bras and panties as she hurried to and from the lavatory in the morning. The townie rode a motorcycle and had an atrophied left leg. Once, on the night the campus security arrived because they were making so much noise, I saw the scar that rose up out of the top of his boot and snaked up past his hip and around the back of his body. She was stoned and screaming on the bed, where she remained chained up. Soon after, she moved into off-campus housing somewhere.
These girls and Debbie were the only four on a hall of fifty that I knew for sure weren’t virgins. The rest had to be, I assumed, because I was.
But even Nancy told a story. She had lost it in a Datsun to her high school boyfriend. Tree in a Toyota. Diane in the basement of a boyfriend’s house. Her boyfriend’s parents had knocked on the window during the act. The other stories I’ve forgotten, and remember only that the make of the car became a nickname for various girls. Few were the glorious cases—a boyfriend who had bought a ring, chosen a special night, and brought flowers, or had his older brother’s downtown apartment for the day. When these girls spoke we didn’t believe them anyway. It was better to say Datsun or Toyota or Ford; it was dues for a peer group, a way to belong.
When that evening of revelation was through, Mary Alice and I, among those outside their rooms, were the only two virgins on the hall.
These fumbled sexual exploits in the backs of cars or in the basements of someone’s parents’ house seem wonderful to me. Nancy was ashamed of having lost “it,” as we all called virginity, in a Datsun, but it was, after all, a normal part of growing up.
In letters sent me over the breaks that year Tree and Nancy were spending every night with their high school boyfriends. For Tree there was talk of a ring being bought. These girls began to take over my landscape.
I also got letters from the boys I’d worked with at my summer job after high school, particularly an older guy named Gene. I begged Gene to send me a photo. Of course, I pretended to the other girls he was more than just a friend, and I wanted evidence to show around.
The photo he sent was clearly a few years old. He was thinner and had more hair but there was the handle-bar mustache that shouted out man. When I finally got the photo late in the first semester I showed it around. Mary Alice cut to the core. “Is it the seventies still? I feel a disco ball dropping down.” Nancy pretended to be impressed but she and Tree were too busy keeping connected with their real boyfriends—boys they’d gone to high school with, whom they had promised to marry someday.
For her part, Mary Alice was obsessed with, in order: Bruce Springsteen, Keith Richards, and Mick Jagger. On the subject of Bruce—for he was our familiar—she was apoplectic. For her birthday I got a T-shirt made. MRS. BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, it said, in puffy, too-big iron-on letters. She slept in it every night.
Honestly, when I look back, I can say I was in love with Mary Alice for most of my freshman year. I loved watching her get away with things and being a troop member in her carefully planned out escapades. Stealing a sheet cake from the dining hall became an operation worthy of James Bond. It involved discovering the tunnel between two dorms that led to the odd door that was always locked. There were keys that needed to be stolen and people who needed to be distracted and finally, late at night, pink cake that needed to be disguised and hustled up to our rooms.
But my dorm girlfriends were also fond of the bars on nearby Marshall Street and by spring they went regularly to fraternity keg parties. I hated fraternity parties, “We’re just meat!” I yelled above the music to Tree, who was ahead of me in the line for the keg. “So what?” she shouted back. “It’s fun!” Tree became a little sister. Mary Alice was always popular no matter how she felt. No fraternity house would turn away a natural blonde and her attendant friends.
I was taking a poetry class and in it, there were two boys, Casey Hartman and Ken Childs, who were unlike any in my dorm. They were sophomores, so I thought of them as mature. They were art students, taking the poetry class as an elective. They showed me the art building, a beautiful old thing that was yet to be restored. It had studios in it with carpeted platforms for the models in the life studies classes and old couches and chairs that the students crashed in. It smelled like paint and turpentine and was open all night so that students could work because, unlike most majors, you couldn’t do your homework for things like metal welding in your room.
They pointed out a decent Chinese restaurant and Ken took me to the Emerson museum in downtown Syracuse. I began to wait for them outside their classes and go to the art openings they and their friends had. They were both from Troy, New York. Casey was on a creative fellowship and never had money. I would run into him and he would be having tea three times from the same bag for dinner. I only knew pieces of Casey’s story. His father was in jail. His mother was dead.
It was Casey whom I had a crush on. But he didn’t trust all the liberal arts girls who found him romantic, his scars from a birthmark and beatings things they wanted to cure. He talked fast, like an erupting coffeepot, and sometimes didn’t make sense. I didn’t care. He was a freak and so much more human, I believed, than the boys in fraternities or in my dining hall.
But Ken was the one who liked me and who, like me, liked to talk. The three of us formed a frustrated triangle. I complained about how many of the girls at Marion were so experienced and how I felt lame. Ken and Casey were quiet at first but then it came out. They felt lame too.
When there was a party at the dorm—and kegs were allowed in your room back then—I would leave and go walk on the quad. I would end up in the art building, making instant coffee in
the basement, and then sit for hours reading Emily Dickinson or Louise Bogan in the spring-shot sofas and chairs spotted throughout the building. I began to think of this place as my home.
Sometimes I would walk back to Marion in hopes the party would be over, and find it had seemingly barely begun. I didn’t even go inside, I just turned around. I slept in the art classrooms, on the carpeted platforms meant to warm models’ feet. They weren’t big enough to stretch out on, so I would curl up into a ball.
One night, I was lying in a classroom in the dark. I had closed the door and made a bed in the back. The lights in the hallways were always on and the lightbulbs were covered in mesh cages so they wouldn’t break or be stolen. Just as I was nodding off, the door to the hallway opened and a man stood outlined by the light coming from behind him. He was tall and wearing a top hat. I couldn’t see who it was.
He turned on the light. It was Casey. “Sebold,” he said, “what are you doing here?”
“I’m sleeping.”
“Welcome, comrade!” he said, and tipped his hat. “I will be your Cerberus for the night.”
He sat in the dark and watched me sleep. I remember, before I nodded off, wondering if Casey could ever find me pretty enough to kiss. It was the first night I’d ever spent with a boy I liked.
I look back and I see Casey as a guard dog. I want to say that under his guard I felt safe, but the person writing this is not the person who curled up on the carpeted platforms inside dark classrooms. The world was not divided for me then as it is now. Ten days later, on the last night of school, I would enter what I’ve thought of since as my real neighborhood, a land of subdivision where tracts are marked off and named. There are two styles available: the safe and the not safe.
SEVEN
The burden of being father and mother to a rape victim fell very heavily on my parents during the summer of 1981. The immediate question that loomed over them was what to do with me. Where should I go? How could I be least damaged? Was it even a consideration for me to return to Syracuse?
The option most discussed was Immaculata College.
It was too late in the game for me to enter any normal college, which had already accepted its students, both freshmen and transfers, for the following year. But my mother was sure Immaculata would take me. It was a girls’ school and it was Catholic and she said a major advantage was that I could live at home. My mother or father could drive me the five miles down Route 30 each day and then pick me up when classes were over.
My parents’ priorities were my safety and the chance not to miss a year of college. I did my best to listen to my mother. My father was so clearly disheartened by her plan that he could barely muster the requisite endorsement (but then, he had no other options). From the very beginning I saw Immaculata as one thing and one thing only. It was a prison. I would be attending it for one reason alone: because I had been raped.
It was also ludicrous. The idea of me, me, I said to my parents, attending a religious academy! I had picked theoretical arguments with the deacon of our church, cultivated any obscene narrative I could get my hands on, and imitated Father Breuninger’s sermons to the delight of my family and even Father Breuninger himself. I think Immaculata and the threat of it inspired me, more than anything else, to come up with an airtight argument.
I wanted to return to Syracuse, I said, because the rapist had already taken so much from me. I was not going to let him take anything more. If I returned home and lived in my bedroom, I would never know what my life would have been like.
Also, I had been granted admission to a poetry workshop led by Tess Gallagher, and a fiction workshop led by Tobias Wolff. If I did not go back, I would be denied both of these opportunities. Both of my parents knew the one thing I cared about was words. No one of Gallagher’s or Wolff’s caliber would be teaching at Immaculata. There were no creative-writing workshops offered at the school.
So they let me go back. My mother still refers to it as one of the hardest things she ever had to do, much harder than any long drive she had to take over many bridges and through countless tunnels.
That’s not to say I wasn’t scared. I was. So were my parents. But we tried to work the odds. I would stay out of the park and my father would get on the phone and write letters to get me a single in Haven Hall, the only all-girls’ dorm. I would have a private phone installed in my room. I would ask to be escorted by campus security guards if I had to walk after dark. I would not go to Marshall Street alone after 5:00 P.M. or hang out. I would stay out of the student bars. This didn’t sound like the freedom college was supposed to promise, but then, I wasn’t free. I had learned it, as my mother said I learned everything, the hard way.
Haven Hall had a reputation. Large and circular, set on a concrete base, it was an oddity among the other square or rectangular buildings that comprised the dorms on the hill. The dining hall, which had better food than many others, sat up off the ground.
But the weird architecture and the good food were not at the heart of Haven’s campus-wide rep. It was the residents. Rumor had it that only virgins and horse lovers (read: lesbians) lived in the single rooms of Haven Hall. Soon I knew the “tights and dykes” moniker to include a variety of female freaks. Haven was home to virgins, yes, and to lesbians, but it was also home to jocks on scholarship, rich kids, foreign girls, nerds, and minority girls. There were professionals—those students who traveled a lot and had things like a commercial contract with Chap Stick that necessitated flying to the Swiss Alps on the random weekend. There were children of minor celebrities and sluts on the mend. Transfer students and older students and girls that for a variety of reasons didn’t fit in.
It was not a particularly friendly place. I don’t remember who lived on one side of me. The girl on the other—an Israeli from Queens who was attending the S. I. Newhouse School of Communications and who practiced her radio voice incessantly—was not my friend. Mary Alice and the girls from freshman year, Tree, Diane, Nancy, and Linda, all lived in Kimmel Hall, sister to Marion Hall.
I moved into Haven, said good-bye to my parents, and stayed in my room. The next day, I traversed the road from Haven to Kimmel, my skin on fire. I was taking in everyone, looking for Him.
Because Kimmel was a sophomore dorm and many of the people from Marion had naturally ended up in Kimmel, I knew most of the girls and boys who lived there. They knew me too. It was as if, when they caught sight of me, they had seen a ghost. No one expected I would come back to campus. The fact that I did made me weirder still. Somehow my return licensed them to judge me—after all, by returning, hadn’t I asked for this?
In the lobby of Kimmel I ran into two boys who had lived below me the year before. They stopped dead when they saw me but didn’t speak. I looked down, stood in front of the elevator, and pressed the button. A few other boys came in the front door and greeted them. I didn’t turn around, but when the elevator arrived I stepped in and turned to face the front. As the doors closed, I saw five boys standing there, staring at me. I could hear it without needing to stick around. “That’s the girl that got raped the last day of school,” one of the boys who knew me would say. What else they said, and what they wondered, I’ve kept myself from imagining. I was having enough trouble just walking paths and riding elevators.
But the second floor was a girls’ hall, so I thought the worst was over. I was wrong. I got off the elevator and someone rushed to me, a girl I had barely known from freshman year.
“Oh, Alice,” she said, her voice dripping. She took my hand without asking and held it. “You’ve come back.”
“Yes,” I said. I stood there and looked at her. I had a memory of borrowing her toothpaste once in the bathroom.
How can I describe her look? She was oozing, she was sorry for me and thrilled to be talking to me. She was holding the hand of the girl who had been raped on the last day of school freshman year.
“I didn’t think you’d return,” she said. I wanted my hand back.
The eleva
tor had descended and risen again. A crowd of girls got off.
“Mary Beth,” the girl standing with me said. “Mary Beth, over here.”
Mary Beth, a plain, homely girl whom I didn’t recognize, came over.
“This is Alice; she lived on the hall in Marion with me last year.”
Mary Beth blinked.
Why didn’t I move? Walk down the hall and get away? I don’t know. I think I was too stunned. I was understanding a language I’d never keyed into before. “This is Alice” translated to “the girl I told you about, you know, the raped one.” Mary Beth’s blink told me that. If it hadn’t, her next comment sure did.
“Wow,” this homely girl said, “Sue’s told me all about you.”
Mary Alice interrupted this exchange, coming out of her room nearby and seeing me. Often, because of Mary Alice’s beauty, people thought of her as a snob if she didn’t go out of her way with them. But for me, in a moment like this, people’s reactions to her were a plus. I was still in love with her and now my adulation included everything she was that I no longer was: fearless, faith filled, innocent.
She took me to her room, which she was sharing with Tree. All the girls of freshman year, save Nancy, were there. Tree tried with me, but we would never recover from that moment in the shower after the rape. I was uncomfortable. Then there was Diane. She was patterning herself so heavily after Mary Alice—imitating her language and trying to compete in coming up with dopey schemes—that I didn’t trust her. She greeted me kindly if eagerly, and watched our mutual idol for her cues. Linda stayed by the window. I had liked Linda. She was muscular and tan and had close-cropped black curls. I liked to think of her as the jock version of me—an outsider who got along by having something that distinguished her in the group. She was a top-rung athlete; I was a weirdo, just funny enough to fit in.
Perhaps it was a kind of guilt at the memory of passing out that accounted for Linda’s inability to meet my gaze for very long. I don’t remember who it was that day, or how it got around to this, but someone asked me why I had even come back.