My mother was warden of the vestry at St. Peter's Episcopal Church. We had been members of this church ever since my family moved to Pennsylvania when I was five. I liked the pastor, Father Breuninger, and his son, Paul, who was my age. In college, I would recognize Father Breuninger in the work of Henry Fielding; he was an amiable if not overly insightful man, and he stood in the center of a small, devoted congregation. Paul sold Christmas wreaths to the parishioners each year, and his wife, Phyllis, was tall and high-strung. This last quality made her a target for sympathetic, but competitive, commentary from my mother.
I liked to play in the graveyard after service; I liked my parents' pre- and post-commentary in the car; I liked being doted on by parishioners; and I loved, absolutely was infatuated with, Myra Narbonne. She was my favorite old lady-my mother's favorite too. Myra liked to say she "got old before it was popular." Often her large stomach was a punch line, or her thinning angel hair. Among a congregation filled with distinguished Main Line types, where the same outfits, perfectly tailored but within an inch of appearing downright shabby, were worn each and every Sunday, Myra was a breath of fresh air. She had all the blue blood she needed, but she wore large seventies wraparounds that were, in her words, "as tacky as tablecloths." Often her shirt didn't come together all the way, as her chest sloped closer and closer to the earth. She tucked Kleenex in her bra, which my own East Tennessee grandmother did, and she slipped me extra cookies when I came in from playing in the graveyard. She was married to a man named Ed. Ed didn't come often to service, but when he did he appeared to be thinking of how soon he could leave.
I had been to their house. They had a pool and liked to have young people swim in it. They had a dog they'd named Freckles, because of his spots, and a few cats, including the fattest calico I had ever seen. During junior high and high school, Myra nurtured my desire to be a painter. She painted herself, and had turned their greenhouse into her studio. I think she also understood, without ever discussing it with me, that I wasn't very happy at home.
During my freshman year, while I was in Syracuse going out with Mary Alice to the college bars along Marshall Street, things happened back home that were alien to me.
Myra left doors unlocked. She went in and out of the house to garden. Freckles needed putting out. They had never had any trouble, and although their house was positioned far back from the road and hidden by a veil of trees, they lived in a neighborhood of gentlemen farmers. So Myra couldn't have imagined a day when three men in black stocking masks would cut her phone lines before forcing their way in.
They separated Myra and Ed, and tied Myra up. They were unhappy with the lack of cash in the house. They beat Ed badly enough that he fell backward down the stairs to the basement level below. One man went down after him. One cased the house. One, whom the others called Joey, stayed with Myra, calling her "old woman," and hitting her with open-handed blows.
They took what they could. Joey told Myra to stay put, not to go anywhere, that her husband was dead. They left. Myra lay on the floor and struggled free of the rope. She could not get down the stairs to check on Ed because she felt something broken in her foot. They had also, though she didn't know it then, broken her ribs.
Defying Joey's orders, Myra left the house. She was too afraid to go out onto the road. She crawled through the underbrush behind the backyard-half a mile or so-before reaching another, less frequented road. She stood up, barefoot and bleeding. Finally a car approached and she flagged it down.
She went to the car window.
"Please get help," she said to the lone driver. "Three men broke into our house. I think they killed my husband."
"I can't help you, lady."
She realized who was in the car. It was Joey, and he was alone. It was his voice. She got a good look at him; there was no stocking mask.
"Get off me," he said, as she grabbed, in recognition, at his arm.
He sped away and she fell down in the road. But she kept going and reached a house, where she phoned for help. Ed was rushed to the hospital. If she had not left the house when she did, the doctors later told her, he would have bled to death.
Then, that winter, St. Peter's was rocked by Paul Breuninger's arrest.
Paul had stopped selling Christmas wreaths in junior high school. He grew his curly red hair long, and didn't come to church much anymore. My mother told me that Paul had a separate entrance to the house. That Father Breuninger felt he had lost control over him. In February, high on acid, Paul walked into a florist shop on Route 30 and asked a woman named Mrs. Mole for a single yellow rose. He and his partner, waiting in the car, had cased the joint for a week. Paul had asked for a single rose each time, watching the register as Mrs. Mole rang it up.
But they picked the wrong day to rob her. Her husband had left moments before with the week's cash. Mrs. Mole had less than four dollars in her cash drawer. Paul flew into a rage. He stabbed Mrs. Mole fifteen times in the face and neck, yelling, "Die, bitch, die," over and over again. Mrs. Mole did not obey. She made her way out of the shop, collapsing in a bank of snow outside. A woman saw the blood, which had slowly trickled down the rise of the bank. She followed the trail and found Mrs. Mole unconscious in the snow.
That May, after my rape, I arrived back to a congregation that was traumatized, no one more so than Father Breuninger himself. As the warden to the vestry, my mother had been privy to his pain that spring. Paul had been arrested, and though still a minor at seventeen, would be tried as an adult. Father Breuninger had no idea that his son had been drinking a fifth of whiskey a day since the age of fifteen. He knew nothing about the drugs found in Paul's room and little about his truancy at school. Paul's insolence Father Breuninger had chalked up to being part of an adolescent stage.
Because she was warden, and because she trusted him, my mother told Father Breuninger that I'd been raped. He announced it to the church. He did not use the word raped but he said "assaulted brutally in a park near her campus. It was a robbery." Those words meant only one thing to any old-timer worth her salt. As the story made the rounds, they realized I had no broken bones, how brutal could it be? Oh… that…
Father Breuninger showed up at the house. I remember the pity in his eyes. Even then, I sensed he thought of his son in the same way he did me: as a child who, on the precipice of adulthood, had lost it all. I knew through my mother that Father Breuninger had trouble holding Paul accountable for the stabbing of Mrs. Mole. He blamed drugs, he blamed the twenty-two-year-old accomplice, he blamed himself. He could not blame Paul.
My family gathered in our living room, the least-used room of the house. We sat stiffly on the edges of the antique furniture. My mother got Fred-as the adults called Father Breuninger-something to drink, tea. There was small talk. I sat on the blue silk couch, my father's prized possession, from which all children and dogs were banned. (For Christmas one year I had coaxed a bassett onto the light blue silk by using a biscuit. I then snapped photos of her chowing down and had them framed, presenting them to my father as a gift.)
Father Breuninger had us stand and hold hands in a circle. He was wearing his black robes and white collar. The silk tassel, from the rope around his waist, swayed for a moment in the air, then stilled. "Let us pray," he said.
I was shocked. My family was a family of commentary and intellect and skepticism. This felt like hypocrisy to me. As he prayed, I looked up and around at Mary, my parents, and Father Breuninger. Their heads were bent; their eyes were closed. I refused to close my eyes. We were praying for my soul. I stared at Father Breuninger's crotch. Thought about what he was under all that black. He was a man. He had a dick like every man did. What right had he, I wondered, to pray for my soul?
I thought of something else: his son, Paul. As I stood there, I thought of Paul being arrested and Paul having to serve time. I thought of Paul being brought down low, and how good that must feel for Mrs. Mole. Paul was in the wrong. Father Breuninger, who had spent his life praising God, had lost his son, really lost him, more than I ever could be lost. I was in the right. I felt powerful, suddenly, and felt what my family was doing, this act of faith or belief or charity, was dumb. I was angry at them for seeing this charade through. For standing on the rug in the living room-room of special occasions, of holidays and celebrations-and praying for me to a God I wasn't sure they believed in.
Eventually Father Breuninger left. I had to hug him. He smelled of aftershave and the mothball smell of the closet at the church where he hung his vestments. He was a clean, well-meaning man. He was in his own crisis but there was no way then, via God, or otherwise, that I could be with him.
Then the old ladies came. The marvelous, loving, knowing old ladies.
As each old lady came, she was shuttled into the living room and seated in my parents' prized winged chair. This chair provided an unparalleled vantage point. From it, the seated person could see the rest of the living room (off to their right would be the blue couch) and into the dining room, where the silver tea set was placed on display. When these ladies visited, they were served tea in my parents' wedding china, and attended to by my mother as honored and unusual guests.
Betty Jeitles came first. Betty Jeitles had money. She lived in a beautiful house near Valley Forge, which my mother coveted and by which she drove very quickly, so as not to appear to be coveting it. Betty had a face full of deep Main Line wrinkles. She looked like an exotic breed of dog, sort of a cultivated sharpei, and she spoke with an aristocratic accent that my mother explained with the words "old money."
I wore a nightgown and robe for Mrs. Jeitles. Again, I sat on the blue couch. She gave me a book: Akienfield: Portrait of a Chinese Village. She had remembered that when I was little, I had told the ladies at coffee hour I wanted to be an archaeologist. We passed the brief time of her visit making small talk. My mother helped. She talked about the church and about Fred. Betty listened. Every few sentences she gave a nod or contributed a word or two. I remember her looking over at me on the couch while my mother was talking; how much she wanted to say something and how the word just wasn't one anyone could say.
Peggy O'Neil, whom my parents called an old maid, came next. Peggy was not Main Line money. Hers came from having taught school all her life and being scrupulous with her savings. She lived far off the road in a sweet house that my mother never lingered over. She dyed her hair the darkest black. She specialized, along with Myra, in having seasonal handbags. Bags made out of wicker with watermelons painted on them for spring, or bags made out of beads threaded with rawhide thongs for fall. Her clothes were workaday shifts-madras and seersucker. The materials seemed meant to distract the viewer from analyzing the shape of her body. Now that I've been a teacher, I recognize them as a teacher's clothes.
If Peggy brought me a gift, I don't remember it. But Peggy, who was less reserved than Mrs. Jeitles, didn't need a gift. I even had to remember to call her Miss O'Neil instead of Peggy. She cracked jokes and made me laugh. She talked about being afraid in her house. She told me it was dangerous to be a woman alone. She told me I was special and that I was strong and that I would get over this. She also told me, laughing, but in all seriousness, that it wasn't such a bad thing to grow up to be an old maid.
Myra came last.
I wish I remembered her visit. Or, I should say, I wish I could remember it in the detail of what she wore or how we sat or what she said. But what I remember is suddenly being in the presence of someone who "got it." Not just knew the facts, but-as near as she could-understood what I felt.
She sat in the winged chair. Her presence was comfort and succor to me. Ed had not fully recovered from the beating. He never would. He had taken too many blows to the head. He was addled now, confused a lot. Myra was like me: People expected her to be strong. Her outward traits and reputation led them to believe that if it had to happen to any of the old ladies at church, it had happened to the most resilient one. She told me about the three men. She laughed as she repeated how they hadn't known how feisty a woman her age could be. She was going to testify. They had arrested Joey based on her description. Still, her eyes clouded over when she talked about Ed.
My mother watched Myra to find evidence that I would recover. I watched Myra for proof that she understood. At one point, she said, "What happened to me is nothing like what happened to you. You're young and beautiful. No one's interested in me that way."
"I was raped," I said.
The room was still, my mother suddenly uncomfortable. The living room, where the antiques had been carefully arranged and polished, where my mother's needlepoint pillows decorated most of the chairs, where gloomy portraits of Spanish noblemen stared down from the walls, was changed now. I felt I had to say it. But I felt also that saying it was akin to an act of vandalism. As if I had thrown a bucket of blood out across the living room at the blue couch, Myra, the winged chair, my mother.
The three of us sat there and watched it drip.
"I know," Myra said.
"I needed to say the word," I said.
"It's a hard one."
"It's not 'the thing that happened to me,' or 'the assault,' or 'the beating,' or 'that'. I think it's important to call it what it is."
"It's rape," she said, "and it didn't happen to me."
We returned to forgettable conversation. A while later, she left. But I had made contact with a planet different from the one my parents or sister lived on. It was a planet where an act of violence changed your life.
That same afternoon, a boy from our church, the older brother of a friend of mine, stopped by the house. I was on the porch in my nightgown. My sister was up in her room.
"Girls, Jonathan's here to visit," my mother called from the front hall.
Perhaps it was his sandy-blond hair, or the fact that he had already graduated from college and had landed a job in Scotland, or that his mother thought so highly of him, and as a result, we knew almost every item of his golden-boy resume; whatever the case, my sister and I had an unspoken and mutual crush. We entered the hall at the same time, I from the back of the house, my sister descending the spiral staircase in the front hall. His eyes were on her as she stepped down. My sister did not flounce. I could not accuse her of being coy or flirtatious or otherwise unfairly competitive. She was pretty. He was smiling up at her and the initial niceties of "How are you?" "Fine. How are you?" had begun. Then he noticed me standing in the doorway of the living room. It was as if his eye landed on a thing that didn't belong.
We talked for a minute or two. My sister and Jonathan moved into the living room and I excused myself. I returned to the back of the house, shut the door to the family room, moved onto the porch, and sat with my back facing the house. I cried. The words "nice boys" entered my mind. I had seen how Jonathan looked at me and was now convinced: No nice boy will ever want me. I was all those horrible words used for rape; I was changed, bloodied, damaged goods, ruined.
When Jonathan left, my sister was giddy.
I moved to the doorway to the family room. They hadn't seen me, but through the window leading onto the porch I'd heard my sister's gleeful voice.
"I think he likes you," my mother said.
"Really?" asked my sister, the pitch of her voice rising on the second syllable.
"It sure looked like it to me," my mother replied.
"He likes Mary," I said, making my presence known, "because Mary wasn't raped!"
"Alice," my mother said, "don't do this."
"He's a nice boy," I said. "No nice boy is ever going to want me."
My sister was dumbfounded. Talk about sinking her ship. She had been buoyant, which she deserved. In the week following her homecoming, she had spent most of her time in her room, out of the fray and away from the limelight.
"Alice," said my mother, "that's not true."
"Yes, it is. You should have seen the way he looked at me. He couldn't deal."
My voice was raised. As a result, my father stirred from his academic lockdown in the study.
"What's all the commotion?" he asked, entering the family room. He held his reading glasses in his right hand and looked, as he frequently did, as if he had been rudely awakened from life in eighteenth-century Spain.
"Thanks for joining us, Bud," my mother said. "Stay out of this."
"No nice boy is ever going to want me," I said again.
My father, without any context, was horrified. "Alice, why would you say a thing like that?"
"Because it's true!" I yelled. "Because I was raped and now no one will want me."
"That's preposterous," he said. "You're a beautiful girl; of course nice boys will ask you out."
"Bullshit. Nice boys don't ask rape victims out!"
I was really blaring it now. My sister retreated from the room and I yelled up after her, "Fine, go write it in your journal. 'A nice boy came to see me today.' I'll never write that."
"Leave your sister out of this," my mother said.
"What makes her so special? She gets to stay up in her room while you put me on suicide watch. Dad is walking around like I'm going to fall apart if he touches me, and you're hiding in the laundry room to have your flaps!"
"Now, Alice," my father said, "you're just upset."
My mother began rubbing her chest.
"Your mother and I are doing the best we can," my father said. "We just don't know what to do."
"You could say the word for starters," I said, stilled now, my face hot with screaming, but tears making their way up again.
"What word?"
"Rape, Dad," I said. "Rape. The reason why people are staring at me, the reason why you don't know what to do, why those old ladies are coming over and Mom is flipped out, why Jonathan Gulick stared at me like a freak. Okay!"
"Calm down, Alice," my father was saying, "you're upsetting your mother."
It was true. My mother had edged over to the far end of the couch-away from us. She was bent over with one hand on her head and one rubbing the center of her chest. I openly resented her then. Resented how attention always focused on the weakest one.
The doorbell rang. It was Tom McAllister. A year older than I, he was the most handsome boy I knew. My mother thought he looked like the actor Tom Selleck. I had not seen Tom since the midnight service at Christmas Eve. We had been singing a hymn. At the close of the hymn, when I turned around in my pew, he smiled at me.
While my father answered the door to welcome him, I slipped down the back hall to wash my face in the downstairs bathroom. I splashed cold water on my face and tried to finger-comb my hair.
I arranged my robe so it covered the necklace of bruises from the rapist's hands. I cried so much each day my eyes were permanently swollen. I wished I looked better. Pretty, like my sister.
My mother and father had invited Tom out onto the porch. When I joined them, he stood up from the couch he'd been sitting on.
"These are for you," he said, and handed me a bouquet of flowers. "I got you a present too. My mom helped me pick it out."
He was staring at me. But under his scrutiny I felt different than I had with Jonathan Gulick.
My mother brought us sodas and then, after a brief exchange with Tom about his classes at Temple, she took the flowers inside to put them in water, and my father left the porch and went to read in the living room.
We sat down on the couch. I busied myself with opening the gift. It was a mug, with a cartoon of a cat holding a bunch of balloons-the kind of gift that, in another mood, I would have disdained. It seemed beautiful to me and my thanks to Tom were sincere. This was my nice boy.
"You look better than I thought," he said.
"Thank you."
"Reverend Breuninger made it sound like you were pretty badly beaten."
I realized that, unlike the old ladies, he saw nothing hidden in those words.
"You know, don't you?" I said.
His face was blank. "Know what?"
"What really happened to me."
"They said in church you were robbed in a park."
I watched him intently. I was unflinching.
"I was raped, Tom," I said.
He was stunned.
"You can leave if you want," I said. I stared down at the mug in my hands.
"I didn't know, nobody told me," he said. "I'm so sorry."
While he said this, and meant it, he also pulled away from me. His posture grew more erect. Without actually getting up to move away, he seemed to invite in as much air as could fit in the space between us.
"You know now," I said. "Does it change how you feel about me?"
He couldn't win. What could he say? Of course it must have affected him. I'm sure it did, but I didn't want the answer I know now, I wanted what he said.
"No, of course not. It's just, wow, I don't know what to say."
What I took away from that afternoon, besides his assurance that he would call me soon and we would see each other again, was that one word to my question: no.
Of course, I didn't really believe him. I was smart enough to know he was saying what any nice boy would. I was raised to be a good girl; I knew what to say at the right moment too. But because he was a boy my age, he became heroic in proportion to any other visitor. No old lady, not even Myra, could give me what Tom had given me, and my mother knew it. She talked Tom up all that week, and my father, who had gleefully derided a boy who had dared to ask once what country they spoke Latin in, played along. I did too, even though we all knew we were clinging to the wreckage; it was useless to pretend I hadn't changed.
There was another visit, this time a few days later and, no doubt, much harder for Tom. Again we sat on the porch. This time I listened and he spoke. He had gone home, he said, from being with me and told his mother. She hadn't seemed surprised, had even guessed as much from the way Father Breuninger spoke. That evening, or the next day, I forget the time line here, Tom's mother had called Tom and his younger sister, Sandra, into the kitchen and told them she had something to say.
Tom said she stood at the sink with her back to them. While she looked out the window, she told them the story of how she had been raped. She was eighteen when it happened. She had never told anyone about it until that day. It happened at a train station, on her way to visit her brother, who was away at school. What I remember best is how Tom said that when the two men grabbed her she had slipped out of her new coat and kept on running. They got her anyway.
I was thinking, as tears rolled down Tom's face, of how my rapist had grabbed my long hair.
"I don't know what to do or say," Tom said.
"You can't do anything," I said to him.
I wish I could go back and erase my last line to Tom. I wish I could say, "You're already doing it, Tom. You're listening." I wondered how his mother had gone on to have a husband and a family and never tell anyone.
After those visits in the early summer, Tom and I saw each other at church. By that time I was no longer fixated on gaining Tom's attention or being seen with a handsome boy. I was scrutinizing his mother. She knew I knew about her, and she certainly knew about me, but we never spoke. A distance grew between me and Tom. It would have anyway, but the story of my rape had stormed into their lives uninvited. It had catalyzed a revelation inside their home. How that revelation eventually affected them I do not know. But via her son, Mrs. McAllister gave me two things: my first awareness of another rape victim who lived in my world, and, by telling her sons, the proof that there was power to be had in sharing my story.
The urge to tell was immediate. It sprang out of a response so ingrained in me that even if I had tried to hold it back, thought better of it, I doubt I could have done so.
My family had secrets, and from an early age, I had crowned myself the one who would reveal them. I hated the hush-hush of hiding things from other people. The constant instruction to "keep it down or the neighbors will hear you." My usual response to this was "So what?"
Recently my mother and I had a discussion about saving face at her nearby Radio Shack.
"I'm convinced the clerk thinks I'm a lunatic," my mother said, on the subject of returning a portable phone.
"People return things all the time, Mom," I said.
"I've already returned it once."
"So, the clerk may think you're a pain in the ass but I doubt he'll think you're insane."
"I just can't go in there again. I can hear them now: 'Oh, there's that old lady who couldn't figure out a fork if it came with instructions.' "
"Mom," I said, "they exchange things all the time."
It's funny now, but growing up, the worry over the opinions of others meant keeping secrets. My grandmother, my mother's mother, had had a brother who died drunk. His body was discovered three weeks later by his younger brother. My sister and I were warned never to tell Grandma that Mom was an alcoholic. We also weren't supposed to talk about her flaps, and she did her best to hide them on our visits to Bethesda, where her parents lived. Although my parents cursed a blue streak, we were not supposed to curse. And even though we heard what they thought of the deacon at St. Peter's (a "supercilious moron"), what they thought of the neighbors ("He's courting a heart attack with all that fat"), what they thought of one sister when the other sister was up in her room-we were not meant to repeat it.
I seemed constitutionally unable to follow these instructions. When we moved to Pennsylvania from Rockville, Maryland, when I was five, my sister had to repeat the third grade. This was because she was too young, according to the East Whiteland school district, to be in fourth grade. So, on this basis alone, she had to stay in third grade for another year. This was traumatic for her because flunking a grade was one of the worst brands you could bear at age eight in a new town. My mother said no one had to know. She failed to say that for this to happen, they would have to wire my mouth shut and keep me from leaving the house.
A few days after settling into the new house, I was in the backyard with our basset hound, Feijoo. I met a neighbor, Mrs. Cochran, who bent down and introduced herself. She had a child my age, a boy Brian, and no doubt wanted to get the scoop on our family. I obliged her.
"My mother's the one with the pits in her face," I said to our shocked neighbor. I was referring to my mother's acne scars. In response to the question, "Are there any more like you at home?" I said, "No, but there's my sister. She just flunked third grade."
And so it went. My mouth only got bigger as time wore on, but I won't take all the blame. I was acutely aware of my audience; the adults loved it.
Simply, the rules of revelation were too complicated for me to understand. My parents could say anything they wanted, but once outside our house, I was supposed to keep mum.
"The neighbors like to pump you for information," my mother would say. "You have to learn to be more reticent. I don't know why you insist on talking to everyone."
I didn't know what reticent meant. I was only following their example. If they wanted a quiet kid, I eventually told them during some screaming match in high school, maybe I should have taken up smoking. That way I would have lung cancer instead of what my mother accused me of having, which was cancer of the mouth.
Sergeant Lorenz was the first person to hear my story. But he often interrupted with the words, "That's inconsequential." He probed my story for facts that would dovetail into the more salient charges. He was what he was: a "just-the-facts-ma'am" cop.
Who could I tell these things to? I was at home. I didn't feel my sister could handle it and Mary Alice was miles away, working a job at the Jersey shore. It was not something I felt I could do over the phone lines. I tried to tell my mother.
I was privy to many things. Little asides from my mother, such as, "Your father doesn't know the meaning of affection," when I was eleven, or the discussions we had had during my grandfather's protracted illness and death. No events were hidden from me. That was a decision I think my mother made early, in direct response to her own mother. My grandmother is stoic and taciturn. In a crisis, her words of wisdom are old school: "If you don't think about it, it will go away." My mother, given her own life, knew this not to be true.
So there was a precedent for our discussion. By the time I was eighteen, she had sat me down and detailed her alcoholism, its onset and aftermath. She believed that by sharing such things I might be able to avoid them or, if need be, recognize them when they occurred. By talking about them to her children, she was also acknowledging that they were real and that they had an effect on us too, that things like this shaped a family, not just the person they happened to.
My memory says it may have been nighttime, I can't be certain, but it was a few weeks after the rape and it was at the kitchen table. If my mother and I were not alone in the house, then certainly my father was in his study and my sister in her room, so we could have heard approaching footsteps if there were any.
"I need to tell you what happened in the tunnel," I said.
Place mats were still on the table from dinner. My mother fidgeted with the corner of hers.
"You can try," she said, "but I can't promise I can do this."
I began. I told her about Ken Childs's house, about taking pictures in his apartment. I got onto the path in the park. I told her about the rapist's hands, how he grabbed me with both arms, about the fighting on the bricks. When I got into the tunnel, started taking off my clothes, when he touched me, she had to stop.
"I can't, Alice," she said. "I want to, but I can't."
"It helps me to try and talk about it, Mom," I said.
"I understand that, but I don't think I'm the one to do it with."
"I don't have anyone else," I said.
"I can make you an appointment with Dr. Graham."
Dr. Graham was my mother's psychiatrist. In reality, she was' the family psychiatrist. She had begun as my sister's psychiatrist, and then wanted to see us as a family so she could see how the family dynamic affected my sister. My mother had even sent me to Dr. Graham a few times after a particularly bad spill down the spiral staircase. I was always running up or down it in sock feet and often would slip on the polished wood. Each time, I did a sort of bouncing pratfall until I reached the landing or my limbs tangled into a configuration that stopped my body just short of the flagstone floor in the front hall. My mother decided this clumsiness might be part of a desire to self-destruct. I was certain it was nothing so sophisticated. I was a klutz.
Now I had a real reason to see a psychiatrist. In the past, I prided myself on being the only member of the family who hadn't had therapy-I did not count a discussion of my pratfalls as therapy-and had tortured my sister while she was under Dr. Graham's care. Mary entered therapy the same year the Talking Heads came out with the perfect song for her little sister to use against her: "Psycho Killer." Sibling brutality with a melody. We had to scrimp to pay for her therapy. I reasoned that what my parents spent on her, they should spend on me. It wasn't my fault Mary was crazy.
Turnabout is fair play, but Mary didn't tease me that summer. I told her that Mom thought I should go to Dr. Graham and we both agreed it might be good for me. My motivation was largely aesthetic. I liked the way Dr. Graham looked. She was feminist in the flesh. She was just under six feet tall, wore large batik muumuus on her dominant, but not heavy, frame, and she refused to shave her legs. She had laughed at my jokes in high school, and after our few sessions regarding my pratfalls, she had said to my mother, in my presence, that coming from the family I came from, I was incredibly well adjusted. Nothing, she had said at the time, was wrong with me.
My mother drove me down to her office in Philadelphia. It was a different office than the one she had had at Children's Hospital; this was her private office. She was ready for me; I walked in and sat down on the couch.
"Do you want to tell me why you've come to see me, Alice?" she asked. She knew already. My mother had told her on the phone when she called for the appointment.
"I was raped in a park near my school."
Dr. Graham knew our family. Knew both Mary and I were virgins.
"Well," she said, "I guess this will make you less inhibited about sex now, huh?"
I couldn't believe it. I don't remember whether I said, "That's a fucked-up thing to say." I'm sure I just wish I had. I do know that was the end of the session, that I got up and walked out.
What Dr. Graham had said came from a feminist in her thirties. Someone, I thought, who should have known better. But I was learning that no one-females included-knew what to do with a rape victim.
So I told a boy. His name was Steve Carbonaro. I knew him from high school. He was smart and my parents liked him-he appreciated their rugs and books. He came from a big Italian family and wanted out. Poetry was the way he chose to escape and, in this, I had more in common with him than I had with anyone else. On my parents' couch, at sixteen, we read to each other from The New Yorker Book of Poetry, and he had given me my first kiss.
I still have my journal entry from that night. After he left, I recorded, "Mom was kinda smirking at me." I went to my sister's room. She had yet to be kissed by a boy. In my journal I wrote, "Yuck, ick, uck, make me sick. I told Mary that French kissing is gross and I didn't know why you were supposed to like it. I told her she could talk to me anytime she wanted to, if she thought it was gross too."
In high school I was a reluctant partner for Steve Carbonaro. I would not go all the way. When he pressured me, I explained myself like this: I did not feel adamant about saying no, but I also didn't feel adamant about saying yes, so until I felt strongly one way or another, I'd stick with no.
By seventeen, in our senior year, Steve had moved on to a girl who would, in the parlance of high school, "put out." At the senior prom, while I danced with Tom McAllister, Steve drank. When I ran into him and his girlfriend, she bitterly informed me that she was doing well, considering that that morning she had had an abortion. Later, at Gail Stuart's party, Steve showed up with another girl, Karen Ellis. He had taken his girlfriend home.
But by May 1981, none of those early rumblings mattered. Two hours in a dark tunnel made my yes-or-no struggles with the morality of sleeping with high school boys like Steve seem quaint.
Steve had gone to Ursinus College his freshman year. He returned, having discovered a new passion for the musical Man of La Mancha. My mother, and my more hard-to-court father, loved his investment in the myth of La Mancha. What better choice to engage a professor of eighteenth-century Spanish than a musical based on Cervantes? Give or take a century, Steve Carbonaro could not have hit his mark cleaner. He spent hours that summer on the porch with my mother and father, being served coffee and talking about the books he loved and what he wanted to be when he grew up. I believe their attention was as important to him as anything else, and his attention to me was a godsend to my parents.
The first time he visited the house that summer I told him I'd been raped. We may have gone out a few times, as friends, before I told him everything else. It was on the couch in the living room. My parents moved as silently as possible in the room above us. Whenever Steve came over, my father would duck into his study, or join my mother in her bedroom, where, in hushed whispers, they would try and conjecture what might be going on below.
I told him everything I could bear to tell. I intended to tell him all the details but I couldn't. I edited as I went, stopping at blind corners where I felt I might fall apart. I kept the narrative linear. I did not stop to investigate how I felt about having the rapist's tongue in my mouth, about having to kiss back.
He was both engaged and repulsed. Here, before him, was live performance, real tragedy, a drama he had access to that did not take place in books or in the poems he wrote.
He called me Dulcinea. He sang the songs from Man of La Mancha out loud, in his white VW bug, and had me sing along. Singing these songs was vital to Steve. He cast himself as the central figure, Don Quixote de La Mancha, a man whom no one understands, a romantic who makes a crown of a barber's shaving bowl and a lady-Dulcinea-of the whore Aldonza. I was the latter.
Following a song and scene called "The Abduction," where Aldonza is kidnapped, and, it is implied, gang-raped, Don Quixote comes upon her after she has been discarded by her captors. With the force of his imagination and will, Don Quixote insists on seeing this raped and beaten woman as his sweet and lovely maiden Dulcinea.
Steve saved up and bought tickets for us to see Richard Kiley play the lead at the Philadelphia Academy of Music. This was my early birthday gift. We dressed up. My mother took photos. My father said I looked "like a real lady." I was embarrassed by the attention, but it was a night out, and with a boy, a boy who knew and had not rejected me. I fell in love with him for this.
And yet, somehow, seeing it played out onstage, with Aldonza chased by a group of men, fondled and abused, her breasts grabbed like lobes of meat, I could not sustain the illusion that Steve Carbonaro found essential to our relationship. I was not a whore who, by virtue of his imagination and sense of justice, he could raise to the height of a lady. I was an eighteen-year-old girl who had wanted to be an archaeologist when I was four, and a poet or a Broadway star when I grew up. I had changed. The world I lived in was not the world that my parents or Steve Carbonaro still occupied. In my world, I saw violence everywhere. It was not a song or a dream or a plot point.
I left Man of La Mancha feeling filthy.
That night, Steve was exhilarated. He had seen what he knew to be truth, the truth of a romantic nineteen-year-old played out on the stage. He drove his Dulcinea home, sang to her in the car and, at his urging, she sang back to him. We were there for a long time. The windows steamed up from the singing. I went inside. Before I did, what was precious to me that summer happened one more time: A nice boy kissed me good night. Everything was tainted. Even a kiss.
Looking back now, listening to the lyrics again, it is not lost on me, as it was then, that Don Quixote dies in the end, that Aldonza survives, that it is she who sings the refrain from "The Impossible Dream," she who is left standing to do battle.
Things between us did not end gloriously; there was no bright, shining star or quest. Ultimately, Don Quixote had a hard time loving chaste and pure from afar. He found someone who would go all the way with him. The summer ended. It was time to go back to school again. Don Quixote would transfer to Penn; my father wrote him a passionate letter of recommendation. And I, with the eventual support of my parents, went back to Syracuse. Alone.