“Do you like this?” he asks. Three, four times he asks.
“Yes,” I say.
Nothing I do matters. Even as he moves me around, muttering, “I got to get off,” he seems oddly bored by what he is doing.
He loses his soft erection and turns me over yet again, pulls my bottom up and jabs a finger in.
“Have you ever been fucked in the ass?” he asks.
He doesn’t wait for an answer. This excites him. His penis hard, he sodomizes me, pushing in fast and without warning.
The pain stuns me. It burns. I fight for air. My face, rubbing into the dirty backstage carpet, is wet and raw. I have held back my tears, but now I choke on them.
“Does your husband do this?” he asks.
I close my eyes and try to breathe.
“Does it feel good?”
He coos the words into my ear. He’s hurting me; he has to know he’s hurting me. Dirt and carpet fibers catch in my throat. I hold my breath and try to give in to the pain, to make it go away.
“Does it feel good?” he asks again.
“Yes.”
“Does your husband do this to you?”
Then it hits me.
This is a prison rape.
Of course. He’s been in prison, and now he’s doing to me what someone did to him. He’s claiming me as his property.
Then: A noise from downstairs. A bang, like a door closing.
Bang: Someone is here. Bang: I will be rescued. Bang: No. He’ll panic and stab me.
He stops, puts his hand over my mouth, and grabs the weapon, pulling out but still hovering over me.
“Be quiet, now. Be quiet.” I nod and he takes his hand away. We freeze in place.
Silence.
Silence.
Nothing.
No one is coming. I won’t be rescued. He will kill me.
He pushes me to the floor again, and keeps going, posing me like a doll: on my back, on my hands and knees, on my stomach. Then he put his penis in my mouth again, hovering above my face as I lie there. I gag, bile rising in a bitter gush into my throat. I can’t breathe. The penis falls away from my mouth.
He slaps my face. “Bitch.”
Then he caresses the spot where he slapped. Gentle.
“You’re my bitch,” he says. “You do what I tell you.”
He moves down my body and burrows his face between my legs. He licks.
Above, I observe: This is weird. Rapists don’t do this. Do they?
He licks more.
Up above, I decide he really doesn’t know what he’s doing. I want to shout down at him: God! Have you ever done this before?
He stops. “I know you liked that,” he says, pride in his voice, as he climbs on top of me again.
How long has it been? I have no idea. The theater feels like a sealed tomb, something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story, soundproof and windowless, with a trapped heart beating inside. I am alone. Utterly alone.
I watch from above. How will it end?
I try something: “I think the people I was supposed to meet will come back,” I say. “They might catch us. We should get out of here.”
He looks at me, thinking about it. Then he nods and reaches for his pants. I crawl across the dirty carpet for my skirt. We dress in a hurry.
“Get your purse,” he says.
I give him all my money: a couple of twenties and some singles. He grabs the wallet from my hands and shakes the coins out, pocketing the quarters and dimes and pennies.
When he has everything, he puts the dagger-scissors up to my back and pushes the point in just enough so I can feel it.
“OK,” he says. “We’re going to go outside now. I told you I wouldn’t kill you, but if you do anything stupid when we get out, I will kill you.”
He leads me out a backstage door and down a staircase, holding my arm, the point of the scissors pressing into my back.
Then he opens a door and we are outside. My brain registers the change in one-word thoughts: Bright. Sun. Air.
Then: DAVE.
In the sun, I see a tattoo on his right arm: “DAVE,” carved into his dark skin in crude capital letters. It looks like someone etched it with a sharpened ballpoint pen. Or scissors, I think, feeling the point in my back.
I glance at him and look away. Now I know his face and his name, or maybe his prison boyfriend’s name. Did he notice that I saw it?
“Where’s your car?” he asks.
My tiny flame of hope sputters and dies. I’m outside, but I’m not free. And now I know too much for him to let me go. Now he’ll take me somewhere in my car and kill me. I hesitate.
“It’s in the lot over there,” I say. Then I add: “Right next to the attendant’s booth.”
This is not true, but I continue the lie. “We can’t go there. We don’t want to get caught.”
He thinks for a second, then turns me so I’m facing him. He licks his finger and rubs at the blood on my neck. He smooths my hair.
“Now, don’t you go to the cops,” he says. “If you go to the cops, I’ll have to go to prison.”
“I won’t go to the cops. I promise.”
“If I have to go to prison, I’ll miss you,” he says, almost cooing. “And when I get out, I will find you.”
He kisses me on the lips and walks away.
CHAPTER THREE
I want this written on my body
I wobble toward my car, holding my torn blouse closed with one hand, the straps on my shoes flapping with each step.
The midsummer evening feels like afternoon, bright and hot, the burned smell of asphalt rising in the still air. The paths through the campus are empty. Everyone has gone home, which is where I’m supposed to be by now. I hear traffic a block away, the hum of the last gasp of rush hour, people thinking about dinner and wondering what’s on TV tonight.
When I get to the parking lot, I see someone in the booth. A man in a uniform. I stumble across the tarmac toward him. He will make me safe.
When he slides the window open, I stand there, mute. My throat clamps shut again. He notices my ripped blouse.
I blurt out, “I was just raped.”
It’s the first time I say the words, and it sounds wrong. Too flat. Too direct. I feel like a fake, a feeling that will return again and again in the days and weeks to come. Why am I not crying or wailing like a real victim? Why do I sound so emotionless? After stating just the fact, I am unable to say anything else.
The man in the booth doesn’t know what to say, either. He falters for a few seconds, staring at me, and then opens the door and points to his stool. “Sit here.” He looks like someone’s grandfather. I feel bad for him, having to deal with this. I sit on his stool, shaking, while he talks into a walkie-talkie. “I have a rape victim here,” he says, and then he steps outside of the booth to wait, leaving me alone for the first time that night.
Seconds later, a guy in a red pickup pulls up and shouts into the window, “Which way did he go?” I point toward Euclid Avenue and the guy speeds off, and before I can figure out how he knew about the rape, a cop car pulls up, and I’m out of the booth and in the front seat.
The cop does not want the story. He wants a description: What was his race? What did he look like? How tall was he? What was his weight?
The cop tries to help: “Was he taller than you, or shorter? Heavier?”
“A little taller than me. He was pretty thin, so I’m not sure if he was heavier.”
“How much do you weigh?”
I pause. “About one thirty,” I say, automatically shaving off the traditional five pounds. This will worry me quite a bit later on. Will someone discover I lied about my weight, and so must be lying about everything else, too?
After more back-and-forth, we arrive at a description: Wiry build, maybe a hundred forty pounds. Slightly taller than me. I’m five-six, so ma
ybe five-seven or five-eight.
“What about his color,” the cop says. “Was he dark or light-skinned?” Again I hesitate. I’ve never described the gradations of African-American skin color; I don’t know the benchmarks.
“I guess he was light,” I say. “Maybe he was medium. I don’t know.”
I try to make up for my indecisiveness by offering something better: “He had a tattoo. A name tattooed on his right bicep. ‘DAVE.’ It was all in capital letters, and messy, like it was made with a pen or a knife.” The cop nods with approval. I have a moment where I feel like what I always tried to be as a child: I’m a good girl.
Then we are at the emergency room, where a dozen people slump in rows of plastic chairs, waiting for someone to see them. The room is dim. A TV hung on the wall plays without sound.
The cop rushes me through the waiting room like a celebrity he has to protect from overzealous fans. If I had a coat, he probably would drape it over my head. He tells me the Cleveland police will come to talk to me. He tells me I did a good job with the description. Then he leaves.
Inside the ER, the intake nurse puts me in a private room, one with a door instead of curtains. With brisk efficiency, she hands me a paper gown and asks for my clothes, then stuffs them into a bag to give to the police. Evidence, she tells me. She brings me a cup of water. She takes down all my information, my history. She asks me who she should call to come to the hospital for me. Am I married? I give her my husband’s phone number at work. She tells me the doctor will be there soon, but first the police need to talk to me. A hospital social worker will come by, too. Do I want someone from the Rape Crisis Center to come? Yes. Please. Then she leaves.
I am alone.
A clock on the wall ticks the seconds. It’s past 6:30. I thought it would be later. Time, after disappearing in that theater, returns to me. It lasted an hour. DAVE trapped me and raped me for an hour.
Outside the room, a gurney rolls past, clacking. Someone moans, then moans louder. Two people rush past my door. I hear the word “gunshot.”
I am alone.
I am afraid.
The air conditioner vent above me blasts refrigerated air into the room. I sit on the exam table in the paper gown, wishing the nurse had given me a blanket. I think again of the other girls, the ones who did not make it to the ER, lying cold in a wooded area off a highway—it always seemed to be just off the highway—under a layer of dirt and brush, waiting for someone to stumble over them.
After a while, I lie back on the table, the paper crinkling under my body, my hands cradling my head. In the silent, chilled room, naked under the gown, I feel like a forgotten corpse, awaiting my own autopsy.
My hand goes to my neck, where he cut me. It’s stopped bleeding. I can feel now that the cut is small, a couple of inches long, maybe three. It is not deep. It is nothing much. I worry about this: Maybe I don’t look hurt. Maybe the cut is so minimal, the doctor will not believe me. The cops won’t believe me.
I start crying. I want the wound to be bigger. I want it deeper. I want it to hurt. I want them to gasp when they see it, the doctors and cops, I want them to ask me how I managed to survive. I want them to tell me they are calling in the top plastic surgeon to stitch it up, so I will not have a scar.
I want this written on my body. Tattooed on my body.
I stop crying and drift, lying on the table. Then they come in, one by one. First the hospital social worker. Then a Cleveland policeman in uniform. Then another nurse. Then the Rape Crisis Center volunteer.
They ask me what happened. The rape crisis volunteer holds my hand while I talk. One by one, I tell them. But what I tell is not my story, it is a list: He did this, then he did that. He was wearing this. He looked like this. He said this. I was scared. I cried. I did what he told me to do.
I do not tell them that I left my body.
They nod, write it all down. “Then what happened?” they all ask. I continue the list.
I know I should be sobbing, shaking, screaming, not reciting a list in a monotone. When I get to the part about the anal rape, the cop goes still. He looks away from me.
With each interview, I leave out the most important fact of all: It was my fault. My own, stupid, gullible, naïve fault. I was late. I walked into that empty theater. I ignored my own warning light. I practically invited DAVE to rape me.
The cops give me their cards. The Rape Crisis Center volunteer gives me a card with phone numbers to call the next day. Then they leave me alone in the room again. Time passes.
The nurse returns with the doctor, a resident who looks like she might be on her twenty-sixth hour of duty, rushing from patient to patient. She gets right to business, her jaws working hard on a wad of bubble gum while she reads my chart. When she bends toward me to look at the cut on my neck, her breath smells like cotton candy.
I note that she does not gasp at the cut. She cleans it with something that smells like alcohol, then asks me if I am OK with her examining me. She says she needs to prepare a rape kit to give to the police—she has a legal protocol to follow.
The stirrups are cold. When I shiver, she warns me that the metal speculum might be cold, too. She inserts it and swabs and scrapes inside me, handing each instrument and swab to the nurse, explaining to me every step of the procedure as she works. She tells me she’s combing my public hair for his hair, swabbing for semen, looking for signs of trauma, gathering evidence of the rape in the folds and secretions inside me. She swabs inside my anus.
“Basically, your body is the main piece of evidence here,” she says as she works, chewing her gum.
Still too calm, I think.
CHAPTER FOUR
She’s gone
The nurse calls my husband, but only tells him I’m in the ER, that I was in an accident and that I’m OK. They leave it to me to tell him what happened.
I am alone yet again in the ER room, lying on the exam table, looking at the ceiling, when the nurse brings him in. I sit up. The nurse almost tiptoes out.
“What happened?” He looks and sounds panicked.
I feel weird that I’m not crying, but I cannot produce tears. After all my panic, I feel numb.
“I,” I say, and stop. I can’t utter the words. I said them to the parking lot attendant, to the cops and social worker and nurse and doctor. But I do not want to say them to my husband. Why didn’t the nurse tell him, or the cops? Are the cops gone?
“I …”
Now I’m standing. He hugs me. My throat burns and clutches up, the way it did when the rapist grabbed me from behind.
“I was raped.” I whisper it into his shoulder.
“Oh no.” He hugs me tighter. “Are you OK?”
I am alive. But I don’t think I’m OK. I won’t know if I am for a long time. Years.
There in the ER, two hours after I was raped, I begin what will become my pattern with everyone close to me: I reassure him. Instead of crying, “No, I’m not OK!” and asking for his help, I speed past my own needs and arrive at his. He needs me to be OK.
“Yes,” I say. “I’m OK.”
It’s dark by the time they finish with me. They give me green scrubs with drawstring pants to wear home. Walking to my husband’s car in the oversized scrubs and my high heels, I still feel watched. I’m still performing in a movie about a young woman, much like me, who has been raped.
We don’t talk as my husband drives home, to the house in Shaker Heights we just bought. I haven’t put up curtains yet, or laid rugs on the hardwood floors, or unpacked all the boxes. The house is dark when we pull in. When we open the back door, it feels like we’re breaking in. In the stillness, my husband whispers that he will run a bath for me.
I don’t want a bath, I want a shower, hot and hotter still, to scald my skin. I say nothing and step into the tub, easing my body into the warm water. I close my eyes and lean back. Whe
n I don’t say anything, he goes downstairs.
I am alone.
I don’t want to be alone. But I don’t want to talk, either. I want to be comforted, but I don’t want to hug or touch. I hear him in the kitchen, opening cabinets. I scrub myself with a washcloth and sit in the water as it grows cold.
He makes dinner for me. Broiled shrimp. I take a couple of bites, like a polite dinner guest, washing the faintly metallic taste out with a cold beer. When we finish, we climb the stairs to our bedroom. I tell him I can’t call my sisters or my mother. My excuse is that I’m too tired. I’ve already told too many people.
He doesn’t know what to do, or how to ask me if he can touch me. I get into bed and tell him to get in, too. I hug him in bed. Then he holds me, spooned against my back.
When the tidal rhythm of his breathing tells me he’s asleep, I inch away from him. I move to the edge of the bed, curling into myself like one of those insects that rolls into a tight ball when it senses danger.
I lie awake, listening to the rhythmic counterpoint of my husband’s breath and the chirping sounds of the summer night.
Safe. Here I am supposed to be safe. But I can’t believe it anymore. I’ve lost the illusion, the pretty, dangerous illusion, that the world is safe. The woman who woke up in this bed fourteen hours ago—the woman who was five minutes late to everything, the woman who thought bad things happened to other people, if she thought about it at all—is gone.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Wino
Tuesday, July 10, 1984.
The next day, DAVE does something no one can quite believe.
He returns to the scene of the crime. Not only that, he returns at the same time of day, wearing the same clothes. He must have believed me when I said I wouldn’t go to the cops. Maybe he even thought I’d come back.
At 4:53 p.m., he saunters into the quad near Eldred Theater, walking north, past a wino sitting on a bench with his bottle in a paper bag. He passes a small waterfall sculpture. The wino watches him, but DAVE doesn’t notice. He stops at a bench, sits down. Across the quad, the wino takes a drink. After a minute or two, DAVE gets up and walks west, toward Severance Hall. The wino follows him from a distance. He lifts his paper bag to his mouth again.