Lucky

by Alice Sebold

  My sister was still a virgin at twenty-two. I spent time wishing she were less pristine. I know she spent time wishing she were less pristine too. But our motivations were different. I wanted her to fall—for that was how it was seen in our household—so I wouldn’t be alone. She wanted to fall so that she would have more in common with most of her friends.

  We lived unhappily on either side of the word. She was one, I wasn’t one. At first my mother had joked about how the rape might put an end to her lectures on virginity, so now she would lecture me on chastity. But something in this didn’t work. It would appear odd if my mother emphasized to my sister the old rules but made new ones up for me. I had moved, by being raped, to a category she found unaddressable.

  So I did what I did with the hardest issues: I took the fall-back position of the Sebolds—a thorough analysis of the semantics involved. I looked up all the words and versions—virgin, virginity, virginal, chaste, chastity. When the definitions didn’t provide me with what I wanted, I manipulated the language and redefined the words. The end result was that I claimed myself still a virgin. I had not lost my virginity, I said, it was taken from me. Therefore, I would decide when and what virginity was. I called what I still had to lose my “real virginity.” Like my reasons for not sleeping with Steve or for returning to Syracuse, this seemed airtight to me.

  It wasn’t. A lot of what I figured out and subverted wasn’t airtight in the least, but I couldn’t admit to that then. I also created a painful reasoning for why it was better to have been raped as a virgin.

  “I think it’s better that I was raped as a virgin,” I told people. “I don’t have any sexual associations with it like other women do. It was pure violence. This way, when I do have normal sex, the difference between sex and violence will be very clear to me.”

  I wonder now who bought it.

  Even with classes and court appearances, I had found time to nurse a crush. His name was Jamie Waller and he was a student in Wolff’s workshop. He was older—twenty-six—and friends with another student in our class, Chris Davis. Chris was gay. I thought this marked Jamie—who was straight—as a highly evolved male. If he could be so openly comfortable in the company of a gay man, I reasoned, he might be able to find a rape victim okay.

  I managed to do all the things love-struck girls do. I had Lila meet me after class so she could get a look at him. Back at the dorm we discussed how cute he was. Each time I saw him I would detail for her what he was wearing. He was a master of what I called shoddy prep. He wore rag-wool sweaters with egg stains on them, and his Brooks Brothers boxers often peeked out of his wide-wale cords. He lived off campus in an apartment and had a car. He went skiing on the weekends. He had what I wanted—a life apart. I mooned over him in private; in public I pretended I was tough.

  I hated the way I looked. I thought I was fat and ugly and weird. But even if he could never find me physically attractive, he still liked a good story and he liked to get drunk. I could tell one and do the other.

  Following Wolff’s workshop, Chris, Jamie, and I would grab a few drinks, then Jamie would say, “Well, kids, I’m taking off. What are you two doing this weekend?” Chris and I never had good answers. We both felt lame. My weekends consisted of waiting for the grand jury and then what followed. Chris later admitted that his weekends had been committed to going to the gay bars in downtown Syracuse and trying, without success, to find a boyfriend. Chris and I both overate and drank too much coffee while reading good poetry. When we wrote a poem of our own that we didn’t despise, we might call each other and read it aloud. We were lonely and hated ourselves. We kept each other laughing, bitterly, and waited for Jamie, fresh and back from a weekend at Stowe or Hunter Mountain, to fill our dismal lives.

  There was the night that fall when I told the two of them about the rape. All three of us were drunk. It was after a reading or a workshop and we had gone to a bar on Marshall Street. It was a bar a bit nicer than most of the student bars, which were more like caverns.

  I don’t remember how it came out. It was in the day or two before the lineup and so it was all I was thinking about. Chris was stunned and the news had the effect of making him drunker. His brother, Ben, had been murdered two years before, though I didn’t know this then. It was Jamie whom I cared about. Jamie I imagined myself falling in love with and marrying.

  However he responded, it could not have fulfilled the rescue fantasy I had fabricated. Nothing could. There was no rescue. The table was awkward for a second and then Jamie found the answer. He ordered another round of drinks.

  Jamie drove home alone in his car to his off-campus apartment. Chris, who lived in the opposite direction, walked me home. I lay on the bed and the room spun. I didn’t like how drinking felt but I liked how it released me. News slipped out and the world didn’t explode and eventually I could count on passing out. I had a headache in the morning and I always threw up, but Jamie, and everyone, it seemed, liked me when I was drunk. The added bonus: I often didn’t remember much.

  After Christmas, we drank more frequently, often without Chris. Jamie told me he had come back to finish his diploma after nursing his father through a protracted terminal illness. He confided that he owned a women’s clothing store in Utica, and had to go down often to look in on it. All this made him more glamorous, but what I really liked about Jamie was his no-bullshit factor. He ate and belched. He slept around. He’d lost his virginity way before I had—he was something like fourteen and she was older. “I never had a chance,” he would say, take a sip of beer from a long-neck, or wine from a glass, and snort gleefully. He joked about how many women he’d had, and told stories about being caught with married women by their husbands.

  I didn’t feel comfortable hearing a lot of this. His promiscuity seemed inconceivable, but it also meant that he had seen and done it all. There were no surprises. In his eyes I would not be a freak. Jamie was not a nice boy. But having a nice boy think of me as “special” was what I wanted least.

  He listened patiently to what was going on in my life: about Gail, or the lineup, or my fear of going to trial. In the weeks that turned into months after the Christmas holiday, I lived in constant anticipation of the trial. Repeatedly it was pushed back. A pretrial hearing was set for January 22 and I went. It was canceled but I still had to show up, prep with the DA, Bill Mastine, and with Gail, who was now pregnant, and so handing most of the reins over to Mastine.

  I saw in Jamie a recognition that the two of us were oddballs. He had gone through a lot with his father and believed that at nineteen, I was distinguished by the rape from most of my peers. But instead of making me feel my feelings, as Tricia from the Rape Crisis Center would want, he taught me how to drink. And I did.

  Jamie and I talked about sex and I told a lie.

  In the bar one night, Jamie asked me—it felt offhand—if I’d slept with anyone since the rape. I said no, but in that second, the expression on his face told me that was not the right answer. I rephrased, “No, don’t be silly, of course I have.”

  “Yeesh,” he responded, turning his beer glass in circles on the table, “I wouldn’t have wanted to be that guy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a pretty big responsibility. You’d be afraid of fucking up. Plus, who knows what could happen?”

  I told him it hadn’t been that bad. He asked me how many men I’d slept with. I made up a number. Three.

  “That’s a good amount. Just enough to know you’re normal.”

  I agreed.

  We continued to drink. I was alone now, I knew that. If I had told the truth he would have rejected me. The pressure I felt to “get it over with”—in my words to Lila—was overwhelming. I was afraid if I went too long, the fear involved in having sex would only increase. I didn’t want to be a dried-up old woman, or become a nun, or live in the house of my parents and stare at the wall ceaselessly. These destinies were very real to me.

  Just before Easter vacation, the night came.
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  Jamie and I went to a movie. Afterward, we got very drunk at the bar. “I’ve got to take a piss,” he said, for not the first time that evening.

  When he was in the men’s room, I calculated. We had been leading up to this point for a while. He had asked the only question that would act as a restraint. I’d told a lie and it appeared I’d told it successfully. The next day he would take off for a ski weekend and I’d be alone with myself and with Lila for a few days.

  He returned to the table. “If I get any drunker I can’t drive home,” he said. “Are you coming with me?”

  I got up and we walked outside. It was snowing. The fresh bite of snowflakes pelted our booze-warmed skin. We stood and breathed in the cold air. Snowflakes gathered on the tips of Jamie’s eyelashes and across the ridge of his ski cap.

  We kissed. It was wet and sloppy, different from Steve, more like Madison. But I wanted this. I willed myself to want it. This is Jamie, I repeated in my head. This is Jamie.

  “So, you coming home with me?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Well, it’s cold as a witch’s clit out here, I’m going home. Come or don’t come.”

  “I have my contacts in,” I said.

  He was smooth and drunk and had done it all a thousand times before. “Well, you’ve got two choices. You can walk home and you can sleep alone in your bed, or I can drive you there and wait for you while you take your contacts out.”

  “You’d do that?”

  He stayed outside in his car. I hurried up the elevator in Haven, went to my room, and removed my lenses. It was late but I woke Lila anyway. I knocked on her door. She answered it in her Lanz nightgown. Her room was dark. I had woken her up. “What is it?” she asked angrily.

  “This is it,” I said to Lila. “I’m going home with Jamie. I’ll be back in the morning. Promise you’ll have breakfast with me.”

  “Fine,” she said, and shut the door.

  I had wanted someone to be in on it with me.

  It was snowing heavily now. To stay focused on the road, we were quiet. The heat rushed out of the dash onto my legs. Jamie was my guide on a mission to a place I’d never been. I had one last chance to make it before the walls closed in. His random promiscuity now seemed glorious to me. In the way he had talked about it, I knew there was as much bravado as there was real joy. I realized even then that he’d been drunk during so many of these encounters. He was drunk now. But all of this was detail work to me. Drinking. Promiscuity. An undirected life. They were all, to my mind, a product of his own choice. No one had made him drink or fuck or run. Now, I can look and see that it may have been otherwise; then, I stared out at the road. The wipers were going. Snow built up on either side of them and formed a white widow’s peak in the middle of the windshield. I was going home with a normal man—by most standards an attractive one—and he was taking me there to make love to me.

  I had spent time imagining his place. It was less than fabulous when we arrived. He lived in a one-bedroom apartment. The living area had no furniture, just milk crates jammed with albums and tapes, and a stereo that sat on the carpeted floor. He walked in and threw his school bag down, took a leak with the bathroom door open, from which I looked away, and reentered the kitchen. There was a let’s-just-get-to-it attitude now that we were in his apartment. I stood in the hallway between the darkened kitchen area and the unfurnished living area. His bedroom was near the bathroom. I knew that was where we were going, knew that was what I had come here for, but I hesitated. I was afraid.

  Jamie said he guessed I was new enough so he should offer me a drink. He had an open bottle of white wine in the fridge and two dirty wineglasses. He held the glasses under the tap and then filled both with wine. I took my dripping glass and sipped.

  “You can put your bag down,” he said. “Music would make this easier, huh?”

  He walked into the living area and crouched down over a milk crate of tapes. He picked up, scanned, and tossed back two or three. I put my book bag near the front door. He chose Bob Dylan, the kind of slow, stalling melodies that always made me feel as if the dead were rattling their chains. I wasn’t a Dylan fan, but I knew enough not to say anything.

  “Don’t stand there like a statue,” he said, turning and coming closer. “Kiss me.”

  Something in my kiss displeased him.

  “Look, you wanted this,” he said. “Don’t clam up now.”

  He suggested I go and brush my teeth. I said I would but I didn’t have a toothbrush.

  “Haven’t you ever stayed over at a guy’s place before?”

  “Yes,” I lied, sheepishly.

  “What did you do then?”

  “I used my finger,” I said, thinking quickly. “And brushed my teeth that way.”

  Jamie walked past me and into the bathroom and found a toothbrush. “Use it,” he said. “If you fuck someone you should be able to use their toothbrush!”

  Frightened and drunk and bumbling, I grasped on to this logic. I went into the bathroom and brushed my teeth. I threw water on my face and worried, for just a second, if I looked pretty. But as soon as I looked in the mirror, I looked away. I could not watch what I was doing. I swallowed hard, breathed in, and left the bathroom.

  Jamie was moving dirty laundry off the mattress on the floor of the bedroom. His sheets were soiled and various blankets lay twisted in knots and balls where they had landed when kicked away. He had turned Dylan up. His ski boots lay outside the door on their sides. He’d brought my wine into the bedroom and put it by his clock radio on the milk crate next to the mattress.

  He pulled his shirt off over his head. I had seen very few men’s bodies before. His seemed scrawnier than I had imagined, and freckled. The waistband of his long underwear had lost its elasticity and spilled out over the top of his pants.

  “Are you planning to keep your clothes on?” he asked.

  “I’m self-conscious.”

  “There’s no time for that,” he said. “I’ve got to get up for Spanish in the morning, and then I’m long-hauling to Vermont. Let’s get the show on the road.”

  Somehow we did. Somehow I lay under him as he fucked me. He fucked me hard. It was what I later heard girls call “athletic sex.” I held on. When he came, he came loudly and snorted and bellowed. I wasn’t prepared for it. I wept. I wept louder than I ever could have imagined. I shook with it. He stopped his noises and he held tightly to me. I felt humiliated but I couldn’t stop. I don’t think he knew that he was what I considered my first, but he was smart enough to know where the crying stemmed from.

  “Poor baby,” he said. “Poor, poor baby.”

  Soon after, he passed out on top of me. I stayed awake all night.

  In the early morning he wanted to have sex again. But first, after kissing me, he pushed me down near his penis. Once there, I didn’t know what to do.

  “Haven’t you ever done this before?” he asked.

  I tried but gagged.

  “Come up here,” he said, releasing me. We kissed some more and, concerned with a look he saw in my eye, he grabbed me by my hair and pulled my head away from his. “Look,” he said. “Don’t do that. Don’t fall in love with me.” I didn’t know what he meant or how to respond to the reprimand. I said I wouldn’t but I didn’t know how not to.

  He drove me back to Haven. “Take care of yourself, kiddo,” he said. He didn’t want responsibility. He’d had enough of it nursing his father. He went off to class and then to ski.

  “Well, I did it,” I wrote on Lila’s memo board hanging on the outside of her door. I knew she was asleep and was thankful for it. I hadn’t slept in over twenty-four hours. I went to my room. I needed time to make it sound good. When I woke in the late afternoon, it was over. I had lost my real virginity. Everything had functioned, if not exactly perfectly, and I had been accepted by a man.

  Of course, I did what he told me not to do. I fell in love with him.

  I did make a good story out of it. I l
aughed at myself, my fumbling. I got drunk. I called Chris and told him. He loved it. He screamed, “You bagged the prize!” I acted experienced and wise around Lila while we ate Swiss Almond Vanilla Haagen-Dazs. Jamie didn’t call me. I reasoned I would see him after Easter, that cool people like the two of us didn’t need things like rings or flowers or phone calls. I packed for the trip home to Pennsylvania. I hid a bottle of Absolut in my red bottom-of-the-line Samsonite. I was fine.

  ELEVEN

  In late April, a month after Easter break, I was on Marshall Street. It was midafternoon. Spring had finally come to Upstate New York in that peekaboo way that it does. There was still old snow on the ground. Each winter, the snow made Syracuse beautiful; it covered the gritty, Northeastern browns and grays of the buildings and roads. But by April, everyone had had enough of it, and the warmth was celebrated by the students. They wore shorts, despite the fact that goose bumps rose up and down their arms and legs, and the girls showed off their Florida tans. The street was crowded, and with the anticipation of the end of classes that meant the start of good times, students were smiling and laughing and buying SU paraphernalia in the stores on Marshall Street.

  I had gone shopping for my sister. She was graduating magna cum laude from Penn. As I walked up Marshall, a group of fraternity boys and their girlfriends were coming my way. They were all bright spring smiles. Two of the boys flaunted their toughness by wearing white starched boxer shorts with the standard no-sock Docksiders on their feet. I looked at them because I had to; they were covering the sidewalk and begging for attention. But there was someone trying to get by them on the other side.

  I grew up watching Bewitched, in which the Elizabeth Montgomery character was able to snap her fingers and freeze everyone but herself and her husband, Darrin. They continued talking while the frozen people stayed still in their awkward, formerly animated poses. That was how it felt that day. I saw Gregory Madison blocked by this crowd, and then, he saw me. Everything else stopped.