Her: A Memoir Read online

  She wept and looked into his eyes, meeting his gaze—his eyes were almond shaped and mahogany brown. The pupils themselves were dilated, wide as dimes. Pleasure had brought him farther inside himself: he was both far away and pinning her down. His long black lashes were curly and thick.

  “Don’t look at my face,” he said coldly. He took off the black sweater she wore, her sister’s sweater, and put it over her face. She hadn’t thought of Sister until just then, and then—it occurred to her: her death would be greater for her living sister than for her. She struggled beneath him. He took the sweater sleeves and tied them behind her head. She couldn’t see or breathe. “Can you see me now, bitch?” He was playing with her.

  “I can’t see you.”

  He pushed the soft cotton of the sweater into her mouth, gagging her. She breathed through her nose, smelled her sister’s sweet perfume. She hadn’t yet washed the sweater.

  He pulled her up. “Come with me.”

  And where was her biting dog but still looking for a stick?

  “I can’t walk. I can’t see.” Her legs were stiff. He took pity and removed her blindfold.

  “Carry me,” she said. “You’re stronger than me. You’re so big.”

  He dragged her farther down the path, her feet sliding on the ground. She lost her remaining shoe and struggled to keep her pants up. She thought of her body, where he would put it. Who would find her?

  He brought her off the path and propped her against a tree. He took and took her. It was late. The sun was setting. She looked up at it—pillows of clouds streaked with bright pinks and oranges.

  “You think you can look at my face?” he asked, hitting her.

  “I can’t see your face.”

  He took his boxer shorts off and put them over her head. He pulled a length of rope from his pocket and tied it loosely around her neck. “You’ll never see me,” he said. “I’m nothing.”

  “But you’re everything to me now.” She could see his outline through the thin blue-checked cotton of the shorts.

  “You’re better than my wife,” he said. “You’re beautiful.” He undid the noosed shorts and she tipped her head back in release. “Let me see your body,” he said. “Take those off your face. Take off your clothes.” She undressed fully for him. The ground was cold. He bit her shoulder and grabbed a fist full of her hair at the nape of her neck, forcing her head to the ground. He had her pinned by the hair, neck arched as far as it could go, chin pointing toward the sky. “I’m sorry I hit you,” he said, “but you made me do it.”

  “I won’t make you do it again.”

  “Will you marry me?”

  “I’ll think about it,” she told him, as if she were actually thinking it over. She’d learned how to skillfully lie over the years, a quality she wasn’t proud of. Her knees trembled and her teeth chattered.

  He entered her again. “Do you love me?”

  Love would make it better, easier. Love is sometimes wrong, she thought, but it is love and love does not maim or kill or hurt. “I’m so cold,” she said.

  He put her sister’s sweater over her tenderly. Time stopped. She was in his hands, he was in her body. She looked up at the trees, their leaves, leaping yellows and reds dancing down to the forest floor. This, she thought, this is what I will take with me if I am taken from here.

  “I’ll never tell anyone about this if you let me go,” she said. “It’s getting dark and I think it’s about time we both get home.”

  “How do I know that? Why should I believe you’d keep your big mouth shut?” He took his fingers and pried her mouth open, pushing a few fingers inside. He pressed her tongue until she gagged.

  The girl cried, begged. “You have to know it because I’m telling you.” She thought of all of the crime shows she’d seen, how police got confessions by playing nice. “I couldn’t send you to jail—I don’t believe in jail. It’s racist and classist.”

  “Don’t let me find you if you’re lying, girl.” The man pulled up his trousers. “Close your eyes and count to ten. I’ll be gone when you’re finished.”

  She counted until she couldn’t hear his feet and dressed quickly. She sprinted up the hill, grabbing on to branches to make it to the top. The park was at the top of the hill where hours before she and her dog had played. She called for the dog. This time, she came, dragging her leash. She’d been afraid for the dog the whole time—the dog was confused and could have darted out into traffic. She began to run toward her apartment and crossed the street. A man campaigning for reelection for the Holyoke town board saw her and moved away in horror.

  “I’m afraid of dogs,” he yelled. “Get that thing away from me.” He saw a girl with torn red pants and no shoes, her hair wild and wet with blood, her eyes blackened, but the aspiring politician was a coward before all else: he saw her pit bull before he noticed her need.

  “She’s friendly, please.” She told him how to reach her husband. For the first time of many she said the words: “I was raped.” The girl fell at his feet. Her dog licked the blood from her face in long slow strokes. The politician called the police and then he called her husband.

  The last thing she remembers is her husband running toward her, leaning forward to hold her. “Get the fuck off,” she yelled, and then more softly, “I’m evidence.” Nothing was ever the same again; she was someone else entirely.

  “I was raped,” she repeated to her husband, in the same tone someone might say they had pasta for dinner the night before. It was like that, matter of fact, half-faced. She spoke the truth as though it was someone else’s.

  * * *

  This is what she learned: There is one road of control, and two choices: take control and kill the body, or live and struggle; ramble in conversations, stop mid-sentence, hide in bathroom stalls and cry. Fear to leave your living room; watch The Accused, watch Sybil and pick a personality. Cut your hair and dye it; waste yourself. Look at the floor, cross your legs, learn to carry flashlights and Mace. Read about yourself in the newspaper. Watch yourself disappear.

  Asked what life was like after her attack, she told everyone she remembered two things. The first was something she said in a phone call she made to an older friend.

  “Now,” she told her friend, “I know what it feels like to be a woman.”

  The second thing she remembers occurred the day after. It was five in the morning and the sun was coming up. She sat smoking a cigarette on her rear porch, watching a dump truck empty the receptacles in the back of the building through her one good eye. The other was swollen shut, bruised, bloodshot. She’d been chewing on the good side of her lip, the side not punched into submission, thinking, I’ve never been so old. She was twenty-four.

  She put out her cigarette and called school. She told the receptionist she wouldn’t be coming in because she’d been raped. She asked the receptionist if she’d need a doctor’s note to confirm. She didn’t wait for an answer; she hung up.

  Before the rape everything was the same. It was autumn and some of the leaves were still green. She had just started graduate school. She had a sister and a mother. She weighed 125 pounds. Her hair was longish and dark. She walked her dog alone every day after class. She loved the woods and climbed its trees. She sang too loudly to the car radio. She liked to eat strawberry squares and she wanted to be a writer.

  Chapter 5

  We played airplane with Mike. He was strong enough that when he swung us around he could hold one of us in each of his hands; our four arms and legs glided through the air. Our two screams of glee shot out down the hallway.

  Mom started dating Mike soon after we moved from Dad’s house. She fell in love with him quickly and fully. Mike was a marine; he’d just finished boot camp. He was a bodybuilder in his spare time and liked to make health shakes in our kitchen: wheat germ, peanut butter, and vitamin powder. He stood over six feet tall and muscles bulged in his arms. His hair was shaved into a Mohawk; he flexed his arms in our hallway mirror, then pulled the hawk into tufts t
hat stood straight up.

  Mike let us wrestle in the house and gave us candy. Dad didn’t come to bother Mom when Mike was over, so Mike stayed often. But he played less with us the longer their courtship continued, and he grew stern.

  At a dinner of cube steak and shelled peas, I flung a spoon of food at Mike. I watched the peas roll down his face and smiled in pride of my aim. “Gotcha!” I said.

  “Children should be seen and not heard,” Mike said and picked up my plate. He placed the remainder of my dinner in the living room. “You’ll eat here until you learn to eat like an adult.”

  We weren’t allowed to talk at dinner unless asked a question, and we weren’t allowed to speak a word on car rides. Our voices distracted Mike from driving. If we made a peep at dinner or on a drive, he’d shake his finger and say, “Children shouldn’t speak unless spoken to.”

  On one of the rare mornings when Mike wasn’t home, as we ate our breakfast, Mom asked Cara and me, “So what do you think of him?”

  “He’s pretty okay,” Cara said.

  My eyes said, I hate everything. Mike included.

  * * *

  We listen to the “Stray Cat Strut” with Dad on his weekends. We eat chocolate for breakfast and watch Dad play with his food. He spits out mashed potatoes, making a worm on his plate. He takes two peas and makes eyes for the potato worm. We laugh. The worm is watching us. Dad tells us how fun it is to be with him.

  Dad dials Mom on the telephone

  “Tell her how much you love me,” he says.

  “Mom, I love Dad.” I am wearing his white undershirt.

  “Tell her how much better it is here.”

  “Mom—”

  “Tell her.”

  “Mom, it’s good here. See you on Sunday.” I hang up fast.

  Mom says Dad will take us away from her. Dad says he will put cement shoes on Mom and throw her in the lake. Dad says if we say a word, he’ll burn us all while we sleep.

  * * *

  Until we were five, we were at Dad’s every other weekend; he liked it when we played games outdoors, so it looked from the outside like he was a perfect father. He cared what the neighbors thought even though he said they couldn’t be trusted. Look at the ground, he’d say. Don’t look the lady across the street in the eyes; she might think you want something.

  When he and Mom divorced, he kept all of our video games and everything else that was fun. The joysticks for our game console sat on his floor. The wires got tangled. I liked to play the game where I got to be a frog and jump across the highway, on the tops of car roofs. One wrong move and you’d get splatted; game over. All of our toys, storybooks, and most of our clothes were at Dad’s house. He’d kept Mom’s baby pictures and her entire wardrobe; he’d taken her clothes from her closet and tossed them into a big heap in the basement, next to the washer and dryer. Some of her things he left out on the curb in the rain, for the garbage collectors to pick up.

  We drove to Mom’s with the radio turned up loud. Dad flipped the station off when we pulled into Mom’s driveway. “Tell me what I want to hear, girls,” Dad said. “Remember what I told you about your mother.”

  Every weekend we said the same thing before we got out of the car and went inside with our mother. “Mom is a witch. Mom should die. Mom is an evil bitch.”

  * * *

  Dad had a swimming pool. He taught us how to swim by pushing us into his pool, one after the other. He said we’d have to learn how to swim for our upcoming vacation to Florida. The pool was a big, above-the-ground model that Dad put up at the side of his yard. He carried us, a twin on each of his hips, up the stairs of the wooden deck, to the poolside. We stood together and looked down at the deep water.

  “Close your eyes, girls,” he said, putting one of each of our hands in each of his. He pulled them up from our sides and asked us to cover our eyes. “Don’t peek.”

  He pushed us in.

  The air whooshed through our hair and we landed.

  We were on our way to Florida.

  * * *

  Dad likes to comb our hair. Our hair is long and brown, hangs to our waists. He starts out softly with a brush, then works his way through until his fingers tickle the tops of our heads.

  “Stop it,” I say. Sister is crying. “She doesn’t like that. You’re hurting our heads.”

  “You sound just like your mother,” he says, as mean as the meanest kids on the playground. “You look like her, too, with all that hair.”

  Dad has an idea.

  “Did you know there is a place where it’s summer all year?” he asks. “Don’t tell your Mom. It’s a secret.” I know we will keep his secret. It isn’t a lie if it’s really summer all year someplace.

  “It’s hot there,” Dad says. “You’ll need to get your hair cut to stay cool.”

  Dad takes us to his barber. I like to watch the barber’s pole, the spinning red and white. Christa and I sit in the chairs. Our eyes spin around with the pole. Men sit and get their haircuts. All of the shop’s seats are full. The men sitting next to us talk about boxing and the new Rocky movie.

  “It’s just not realistic. But he’s some actor,” one man says. The rest nod, put their hands in their laps. They lose more hair.

  The barber gets close to my face and talks loud. “Are you next, pretty girl?” Dad pushes me forward.

  “I never saw Rocky.” That’s all I could say.

  “Such pretty, pretty hair” the barber says. When he’s done cutting, there’s none left.

  Sister is next. The barber cuts her hair shorter than he cuts mine. Sister cries harder with each snip of his scissors.

  “You look like Dorothy Hamill,” Dad says. “Don’t cry, sweetie. She’s a real sex pot.”

  We don’t know Dorothy Hamill but we know Dorothy and her yellow brick road. We know her braids.

  Dad buys us balloons shaped like Mickey Mouse heads.

  “Don’t tell you mother about the place where it’s summer all of the time.”

  “Okay.”

  “Say it.”

  * * *

  We said what we were supposed to.

  But instead of dropping us off and driving away, like he usually did, Dad walked us to Mom’s front porch. Mom answered the door and Dad stood back. He hid.

  Mom was quiet for a minute, then her eyes grew huge. “Oh my God, my girls.” Mom covered her mouth with one of her hands. “Ladies?” She scooped us up and slammed the door. We heard Dad laughing on the other side. Our balloons flew away.

  She ran her fingers through our short hair. “It will grow back, honey. I promise,” she said to neither of us. Mom paced the kitchen. I remember having the feeling that this wasn’t like the time Cara cut the hair on my Barbie doll. Mom told her then that she’d have to apologize and save up her allowance and buy me a new doll. “Barbie’s hair is permanent,” Mom said. “It never changes.”

  “We look like Dorothy Hamill, Mom,” Cara said.

  Dad said he has a surprise. I tried to tell Mom. “We are going to a place where it is never winter.”

  * * *

  I’m not sure what Mom would have done had she not married our father; I’ve asked her many times and she always says the same thing. “I love you girls, and once you were born I stopped wanting for myself.”

  “You couldn’t have given up on yourself by twenty-three,” I tell her, certain.

  But she might have.

  It seems to me that the difficult thing in life is to find what stirs you and move toward it. Mom put us first but also put us in the way of whatever moved her and, so, avoided the anxiety of the unknown, the fear of failure, the pain of opening up her heart and feeling her losses. Her selflessness was also her selfishness. But Mom told us that we were smart, funny, beautiful. “Capable young women,” she called us, pushing us onward and out, fighting her desire to keep us home, though there was no question that should hard times come, home was the place to return to.

  * * *

  We are in the car to
Florida: the drive to the summer place is long. We keep asking, “Are we there yet?” Dad says we are as close to there as we’ll ever be.

  We sing to the radio and drink orange juice.

  When we get to the place where it is always summer, the sign says, WELCOME TO FLORIDA.

  It’s hot. I wonder how far away from home we are.

  Dad says we can’t call Mom and that we are the luckiest girls alive because tomorrow we are going to see Mickey Mouse. “That’s right, girlies, Mr. Mouse himself.”

  “I miss Mom,” I say.

  Dad ignores me like he does when I repeat a bad word.

  We check into a hotel and Sister and I get to share a bed. We fall right to sleep. Dad watches us and smokes a cigarette. He keeps the phone off the hook in the hotel room.

  Disney World is better than on television. We eat cotton candy and ride Space Mountain. We go to the Hall of Presidents. We watch fireworks and eat dinner in Cinderella’s castle. We stop thinking about Mom.

  One day Dad packs our bags and says we can’t go back to see Mickey. He mumbled something about the police and Mom. I remember Mom. I feel sorry that I forgot her.

  We drive home.

  WELCOME TO NEW YORK, a sign says. It’s warm here, too. It was June when we left and now it’s July.

  There is a truck in Mom’s driveway and men are putting our things in it. Mom kisses us and hugs us hard. Mike comes out of the house. He has a fresh crew cut.

  “Honey.” Mom is looking at both of us. “We got married. Mike is your dad now. We are moving far away.”

  We look at our old dad in his car and wave at him. We are too young to know we won’t see him again.

  * * *

  While we were away in Florida Mom had married Mike, in a small ceremony in her sister’s backyard. In the photographs, Mom wears a white spaghetti strap sundress with tiny pink and purple flowers. She was tanned and tiny, had a modest bouquet; Mike smashed wedding cake in her face; she smashed it in his.