by Alice Sebold
It was aggressive. The tone it was asked in implied that in having come back I had done something wrong—something not normal. Mary Alice caught the tone and didn’t like it. She said something short and sweet, like “Because it’s her fucking right,” and we left the room. I counted my blessing in Mary Alice and didn’t stop to count my losses. I was back in school. I had classes to attend.
Some first impressions are indelible, like mine of Tess Gallagher. I was registered for two of her classes: her workshop, and a sophomore-level survey course of literature. The survey course was at 8:30 A.M. two days a week, not a popular time slot.
She walked in and strode to the front of the room. I was sitting in the back. The first-day sizing-up ritual began. She was not a dinosaur. This was good. She had long brown hair held back by combs near her temples. This hinted at an underlying humanity. Most noticeable, though, were her highly arched eyebrows and Cupid’s-bow lips.
I took this all in while she stood silent in front of us and waited for the stragglers to settle and for backpacks to be zipped or unzipped. I had pencils ready, a notebook out.
She sang.
She sang an Irish ballad a cappella. Her voice was at once lusty and timorous. She held notes bravely and we stared. She was happy and mournful.
She finished. We were stunned. I don’t think anyone said anything, no dumb questions about whether they were in the right class. My heart, for the first time back in Syracuse, filled up. I was sitting in the presence of something special; that ballad confirmed my choice to return.
“Now,” she said, looking at us keenly, “if I can sing a ballad a cappella at eight-thirty in the morning, you can come to class on time. If you think that’s something you can’t manage, then drop.”
Yes! I said inside my head. Yes!
She told us about herself. About her own work as a poet, about her early marriage, her love of Ireland, her involvement in Vietnam War protests, her slow path toward becoming a poet. I was rapt.
The class ended with an assignment out of the Norton Anthology for the next class. She left the room as the students packed up.
“Shit,” a boy in an L. L. Bean T-shirt said to his female companion in a ΔØΣ T-shirt, “I’m out of here, this lady’s a fruitcake.”
I gathered my books with Gallagher’s reading list on top. Besides the required sophomore Norton, she recommended eleven books of poetry that were available at an off-campus bookshop. Elated by this poet, and having hours to pass before my first fiction workshop with Wolff, I bought tea in a place underneath the chapel and then crossed the quad. It was sunny out and I was thinking of Gallagher and imagining Wolff. I liked the name of one of the books she’d listed, In a White Light by Michael Burkard. I was thinking of that, and reading the Norton while I walked, when I ran into Al Tripodi.
I didn’t know Al Tripodi. As was becoming more and more common, Al Tripodi knew me.
“You came back,” he said. He took two steps forward and hugged me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t know you.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, “of course, I’m just so happy to see you.”
He had startled me but he was happy, truly so. I could see it in his eyes. He was an older student, balding, and with a vibrant mustache that struggled for attention with his blue eyes. His face may have seemed older than he was. The lines and creases in it reminded me of those I later saw on men that thrilled in riding motorcycles cross-country with no helmets on.
It came out that he had something to do with campus security and was around the night I was raped. I felt awkward and exposed, but I liked him too.
It also made me mad. I couldn’t get away from it. I began to wonder how many people knew, how far the news had spread and who had spread it. My rape had made the city paper but my name wasn’t used—just “Syracuse coed.” Yet I reasoned my age, and even the name of my dorm, could still make me one of fifty. Naively, perhaps, I hadn’t known I would have to deal with this question every day: Who knew? Who didn’t know?
But you can’t control a story and mine was a good one. People, even naturally respectful ones, felt emboldened in the telling because the assumption was that I would never choose to return. The police had placed my case in the inactive file when I left town; my friends, save Mary Alice, had done the same. Magically I became story, not person, and story implies a kind of ownership by the storyteller.
I remember Al Tripodi because he saw me not merely as “the rape victim.” It was something in his eyes—the way he placed no distance between the two of us. I developed a sensing mechanism, and it would register immediately. Does this person see me or rape? By the close of the year, I came to know the answer to that question, or so I thought. I got better at it, at least. Often, because it was too painful, I chose not to ask it. In these exchanges, where I shut off so I could order a coffee or ask another student for a pen, I learned to close a part of myself down. I never knew exactly how many people connected what had been in the paper or the rumors that had come out of Marion Dorm with me. I heard about myself sometimes. I was told my own story. “You lived in Marion?” they would ask. “Did you know that girl?” Sometimes I listened to see what they knew, how the game of Telephone had translated my life. Sometimes I looked right at them and said: “Yes, that girl was me.”
In class, Tess Gallagher was keeping my pencil busy. I wrote down in my notebook that I should be writing “poems that mean.” That to tackle the hardest things, to be ambitious, was what Gallagher expected of us. She was tough. We were to memorize and recite, because she had had to as a student, a poem a week. She made us read and understand forms, scan lines, had us write a villanelle and a sestina. By shaking us up, using a rigorous approach, she hoped to both encourage us to write poems that meant, and to dispel any belief that feigning despond was what created good poetry. It got so you knew, very quickly, what would get Gallagher riled. When Raphael, who had a pointed goatee and a waxed mustache, said he hadn’t a poem to turn in because he was happy and he could only write when he was depressed, Gallagher’s Cupid’s-bow lips pursed, her preternaturally raised eyebrows raised farther, and she said, “Poetry is not an attitude. It is hard work.”
I had not written anything about the rape except journal entries in the form of running letters to myself. I decided to write a poem.
It was awful. As I recall it now, it ran five pages and rape was only a muddled metaphor that I tried to contain inside a wordy albatross that purported to be about society and violence and the difference between television and reality. I knew it wasn’t my best but I thought it showed me to be smart, to be able to write poems that meant but also had format (I divided it into four sections using Roman numerals!).
Gallagher was kind. I hadn’t turned the poem in to be work-shopped, so we met in her office for a conference. Her office, like Tobias Wolff’s across the hall, was small and crowded with books and reference materials, but whereas Wolff’s looked like he hadn’t quite settled in, Gallagher’s seemed like she had been there for years. Her office was warm. She had tea in a mug on her desk. A colorful Chinese silk shawl was draped across the back of her chair, and that day her long, wavy hair was held back by sequined combs.
“Let’s talk about this poem you’ve given me, Alice,” she said.
And somehow I ended up telling her my story. And she listened. She was not bowled over, not shocked, not even scared of the burden this might make me as her student. She was not motherly or nurturing, though she was both those things in time. She was matter-of-fact, her head nodding in acknowledgment. She listened for the pain in my words, not to the narrative itself. She was intuiting what it meant to me, what was most important, what, in that confused mass of experience and yearning she heard in my voice, she could single out to give back.
“Have they caught this guy?” she asked after listening to me for some time.
“No.”
“I have an idea, Alice,” she said. “How about you start a poem with this line.” An
d she wrote it down. If they caught you …
If they caught you,
long enough for me
to see that face again,
maybe I would know
your name.
I could stop calling you ‘the rapist,’
and start calling you John or Luke or Paul.
I want to make my hatred large and whole.
If they found you, I could take
those solid red balls and slice them
separately off, as everyone watched.
I have already planned what I would do
for a pleasurable kill, a slow, soft, ending.
First,
I would kick hard and straight with a boot,
into you, stare while you shot quick and loose,
contents a bloody pink hue.
Next,
I would slice out your tongue,
You couldn’t curse, or scream.
Only a face of pain would speak
for you, your thick ignorance through.
Thirdly,
Should I hack away those sweet
cow eyes with the glass blades you made
me lie down on? Or should I shoot, with a gun,
close into the knee; where they say
the cap shatters immediately?
I picture you now,
your fingers rubbing sleep from
those live blind eyes, while I rise restlessly.
I need the blood of your hide
on my hands. I want to kill you
with boots and guns and glass.
I want to fuck you with knives.
Come to me, Come to me,
Come die and lie, beside me.
When I finished this poem I was shaking. I was in my room at Haven Hall. Despite its wobbles as a poem, its heavily Plath-influenced rhymes, or what Gallagher later called “overkill” in many places, it was the first time I’d addressed the rapist directly. I was speaking to him.
Gallagher loved it. “Now that’s the ticket,” she said to me. I had written an important poem, she told me, and she wanted it to be workshopped. This was a big step. This meant sitting in a room with fourteen strangers—one of them, as it happened, Al Tripodi—and basically telling them I had been raped. Buoyed by Gallagher, but still afraid, I agreed to do it. I worried over a title. Finally, I made up my mind: “Conviction.”
I passed the poem out and then, as was standard practice, I read it aloud to my fellow students. I was, as I read it, hot. My skin blushed and I could feel the blood rush to my face, prickle along the tops of my ears and the ends of my fingers. I could feel the class around me. They were riveted. They were staring at me.
When I was done, Gallagher had me read it again. Before she did this, she told the class that she expected everyone to comment. I read it again, and this time it felt like torture, an instant replay of something that had been hard enough the first time. I still question why Gallagher was so insistent that I workshop “Conviction” and that each and every student—this was not standard—respond to it afterward. It was an important poem by her standards, in that it dealt with important material. Perhaps, by her actions, she meant to emphasize this not only to the class, but to me as well.
But the eyes of most of my peers had a hard time meeting mine.
“Who wants to start?” Gallagher asked. She was direct. By her example she was telling the class: This is what we do here.
Most of the students were shy. They buried their response in words like brave, or important, or bold. One or two were angry that they had to respond, felt the poem, combined with Gallagher’s admonition that they react, was an act of aggression on her part and mine.
Al Tripodi said, “You don’t really feel that way, do you?”
He was looking right at me. I thought of my father. Suddenly, there was no one else in the room.
“Like what?”
“You don’t want to shoot him in the knees and that other stuff with the knives. You can’t feel that way.”
“Yes, I do,” I said. “I want to kill him.”
The room was still. Only Maria Flores, a quiet latino girl, had yet to speak. When Gallagher told her it was her turn, she passed. Gallagher pressed. Maria said she could not speak. Gallagher said she could formulate her thoughts during the break and then speak. “Everyone must comment,” she said. “What Alice has given you is a gift. I think it’s important that everyone recognize this and respond to her. You are joining her at the table by speaking.”
We took a break. Al Tripodi quizzed me further out in the flagstone hall near the display case where faculty publications and awards sat on dusty glass shelves. I stared down at the dead bugs that had gotten stuck inside.
He could not understand how I could write those words.
“I hate him,” I said.
“You’re a beautiful girl.”
Presented with this for the first time, I was unable to recognize something I would come up against time and time again. You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful. Like any girl, I wanted to be beautiful. But I was filled with hate. So how could I be both for Al Tripodi?
I told him about a dream I had over and over again those days. A daydream. Somehow, I wasn’t sure how, I could get at the rapist and do anything to him that I wanted. I would do those things in my poem, I told Tripodi, and I would do worse.
“What is there to gain by that?” he asked me.
“Revenge,” I said. “You don’t understand.”
“I guess I don’t. I feel sorry for you.”
I scrutinized the dead bugs on their backs, how their legs went out and then shot back in at sharp angles, how their antennae fell in stilled fragile arcs like lost human eyelashes. Tripodi could not see it because I didn’t move a muscle, but my body was a wall of flames. I would not take pity, anybody’s.
Maria Flores did not come back to class. I was infuriated. They just couldn’t deal, I thought, and this made me angry. I knew I was not beautiful and in Gallagher’s presence, for three hours that day, I didn’t have to care about being beautiful. She, by writing that first line down, by workshopping the piece, had given me my permission slip—I could hate.
Exactly one week later, Gallagher’s if they caught you would turn out to be all too prescient. On October 5, I ran into my rapist on the street. By the end of that night, I could stop calling him “the rapist,” and start calling him Gregory Madison.
I had workshop that day with Tobias Wolff.
Wolff, whom I met the same day I did Gallagher, was a harder sell. He was a man, and at the time men had to surprise me before I even so much as thought about trusting them. He was not a performer. He made it clear that his personality was not the issue—fiction was. So I, who had decided to be a poet and had lucked into this fiction thing, took a wait-and-see attitude. I was the only sophomore in Wolffs class and the only one to wear weird clothes. The fiction writers wore a lot of starch and denim, shirts emblazoned with sports teams or upright plaids. Poets flowed. They did not, most certainly, wear shirts emblazoned with the logos of sports teams. I saw myself as a poet. Tobias Wolff, with his military posture and never indirect analysis of a story, was not my bag.
Before class I needed to get something to eat. I walked down to Marshall Street from Haven. I had been in Syracuse for a month and begun to make quick trips to Marshall Street, as everyone did, for snacks and school supplies. There was a mom-and-pop store that I liked. It was run by a Palestinian man in his sixties, who often told stories and who had an emphasis, when he said “Good day,” that told me he meant it.
I was walking down the street when I saw, up ahead, a black man talking to a shady-looking white guy. The white guy stood in an alleyway and talked over the top of the fence. He had long brown hair, to his shoulders, and a few days’ growth of beard. He wore a white T-shirt whose sleeves were rolled up to accentuate the small bellies of his biceps. The black guy I could see only from the back, but I was hyperaware. I went through my checklist: righ
t height, right build, something in his posture, talking to a shady guy. Cross the street!
I did. I crossed the street and walked the rest of the way to the mom-and-pop store. I did not look back. I crossed the street again to walk directly into the store. Time slowed down here. I remember things in the way one rarely does. I knew I had to go back outside and I tried to calm myself. Inside the store I chose a peach yogurt and a Teem soda—two items, if you knew me, that testified to my faltering composure. When the Palestinian man rang them up, he was brusque and hurried. There was no “Good day.”
I left the store, crossed directly back to the safety of the other side of the street, and shot a quick glance over to the alleyway. Both men were gone. I also noticed a policeman to my right, on my side of the street. He was getting out of his patrol car. He was very tall, over six feet, and had bright, carrot-orange hair and a mustache. He seemed in no hurry. I assessed my surroundings and decided I was okay. It had been just a more intense version of the fear I had felt around certain black men ever since the rape. I checked my watch and quickened my step. I did not want to be late for Wolff’s workshop.
Then, as if out of nowhere, I saw my rapist crossing toward me. He walked diagonally across the street from the other side. I did not stop walking. Or scream.
He was smiling as he approached. He recognized me. It was a stroll in the park to him; he had met an acquaintance on the street.
I knew him but I could not make myself speak. I needed all my energy to focus on believing I was not under his control again.
“Hey, girl,” he said. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” He smirked at me, remembering.
I did not respond. I looked directly at him. Knew his face had been the face over me in the tunnel. Knew I had kissed those lips, stared into those eyes, smelled the crushed-berry smell on his skin.
I was too afraid to yell out. There was a cop behind me but I could not scream: “That’s the man who raped me!” That happens in movies. I put one foot in front of the other. I heard him laughing behind me. But I was still walking.