A Secret Rage (11 page)

‘I don’t know if you can see this,’ I said to Elaine and to myself. ‘But the man who raped me wants me to be destroyed by what he did. He wanted to hurt me; and he did. I couldn’t do one damn thing about it. But he wants me to keep on hurting. I can do something about that. I
won’t give him the satisfaction
.’ My fingers were clenched in fists by the time I finished. I meant what I said down to my bones, I meant it more than I’ve ever meant anything.

‘Well,’ Elaine said briskly, ‘I think you’re making a mistake, Nickie.’ She rose in one graceful movement and brushed her hands against her skirt. Washing herself clean of me. ‘You would forget a lot faster if you moved away. But you’re a grown woman, and Mimi owns this house, so I guess there’s nothing more I can say.’

But of course there was. Elaine was deeply shaken, not only by the anger of her children but by what she must have seen as a NOW diatribe delivered by, of all people, a former model. Elaine’s face was red; she was holding down her voice with an effort. ‘I personally feel you should get out of town and try to put this behind you. And may I add, Don agrees with me.’

Mimi and her brother exchanged glances. Mimi had long ago told me that her father agreed with everything Elaine said, to keep the peace and because he loved her. He just did what he wanted after he’d completed his lip service.

‘When you get over this being brave to impress people’ – and Elaine glanced pointedly from me to Cully – ‘you may take my advice.’ Her face twisted with genuine passion. ‘Honey, how are you going to pass them on the street? Knowing one of them raped you? They’ll all talk about it, you know. How will you be able to stand it? I bet half the niggers in town know who did it, but will they tell? Oh no, not on one of their own.’

In the North I’d become accustomed to racism being more cleverly cloaked, among my chic acquaintances. I’d temporarily forgotten Elaine’s earlier ranting about ‘welfare’ and ‘taking things for free.’ Now I understood what she had meant all along. White men wouldn’t date me because a black man had raped me, she thought.

‘Mrs Houghton, the man who raped me was white. I don’t know anything else about him; but I do know that he was not black. I know from the voice.’

That shocked Elaine more than anything else I could have said. She stared at me in utter disbelief. Then she obviously decided I was making my rapist white out of rampant liberalism. ‘You poor child,’ she said, and marched out the door.

‘What can I say?’ Mimi cried. ‘Nick, I’m so sorry.’

‘I wonder how much of what she said is true.’

‘Nothing!’

‘A little,’ Cully said. Mimi made a violent gesture of protest, but Cully raised his hand to silence her. ‘You’re going to notice changes in attitudes,’ he told me steadily. ‘But mostly it’ll be because people won’t know how to express sympathy to a woman who’s just been through a rape. They’ll be uncomfortable, because they won’t know whether you want to talk about it, or maybe couldn’t stand it being mentioned. It’s almost like . . .’ He thought for a moment. ‘Like you had an enormous green wart on the tip of your nose. No one here would ever dream of mentioning it to you, out of kindness and embarrassment. Even if you had that green wart removed, people
still
wouldn’t say anything – for fear of admitting that it had disfigured you before.’

I nodded. I could remember how it bad been, when this had been the only country I knew. And I remembered, with shame, how uncomfortable I’d been when I talked with Barbara Tucker. I’d put her misery at arm’s distance. I was guilty of more than an open window after all, I decided.

‘Men, especially, may be uncomfortable,’ Cully continued, still speaking in his steady professional voice, but with his eyes averted.

Thanks, Cully. I’d already figured that out.

‘They may feel guilty that one of them did this to you. Maybe they’ll feel uneasy about how you’re going to react to other men now – dating and sex and so forth.’

‘Gosh, it’s great having a psychologist in the family,’ Mimi said savagely. She mimed gap-mouthed admiration.

‘I need to be forewarned, Mimi,’ I said. ‘I’d never . . . naturally, I’d never thought of all this.’ Others were certainly going to invest a lot of emotion in my tragedy.

‘You haven’t exactly had time,’ she said briskly. ‘Now, I think you ought to try to walk around some, so you won’t get stiff. The doctor wants to see you again this afternoon and take some x-rays of your ribs, just to check, and the police want to take pictures. We have to make a dentist appointment, too.’

I didn’t want to see anyone at all. I didn’t want my face recorded. I wanted to stay in the house. I wanted to get dressed and study. I wanted to do anything normal, anything routine, to keep from remembering the night before. But there was my brave speech to Elaine Houghton to live up to. I rubbed my forehead. There was a gap, I thought, between my intentions and my desires. There was more to face now than I’d faced the night before, when I had seen the thread of my life held in someone else’s hands.

The thread of my life was in my own hands again. I was
alive
to face those problems.

Gratitude raced through me for the precious life I had kept. I looked at the sunlight drifting through the curtains. I looked over at my books, piled on the desk on the other side of the room. I was deeply grateful to God that I would be able to open those books again.

I would pay a price for my life. I might lose some of the friends I’d just begun making, lose them in a welter of embarrassment and misunderstanding. But what did that matter if I was still alive?

At that second, I felt I would never lose the wonderful awareness that everything was new for me. I had thought my eyes would never see the world again. I decided I would never take for granted any action my live hands could perform. I looked at those hands, saw the veins still working to purify my still-circulating blood, flexed the muscles that worked so miraculously. I watched the bones move under my skin.

That glory, that beauty, didn’t ebb, even when I stood painfully, even when Cully helped me hobble out to the kitchen for the most delicious bowl of Campbell’s chicken noodle I’d ever tasted.

* * * *

Cully explained something to me later that day.

‘I started to tell you twice, once the day I first saw you and again when we were on our way back from the landfill. I have a friend on the police force, a guy I used to hang around with in the summers.’ Cully, like Mimi, had gone away to school. ‘He told me that when Heidi Edmonds got raped, the police thought it was a fluke. A transient, or maybe a boyfriend no one knew about who got carried away. But then they began hearing rumors that another woman had been raped and just couldn’t report it. And then another.

‘So, my friend figured it wasn’t a fluke. There really was a rapist in town. He got the police chief to come to me, with the idea I could give them some directions to look in. But there wasn’t anything I could tell them that was helpful. I started to warn you, twice. But both times I decided I’d just frighten you more than I’d get you to be alert. I figured you’d be on your toes anyway, since you’d lived in New York. And after Barbara got raped, I didn’t think I needed to say anything.’

It wouldn’t have made any difference, and I told him so. His face relaxed. ‘Cully, even if I’d locked my window, which I only
might
have done if you’d warned me, the police told Mimi the locks on those windows are so old a ten-year-old could get in. Don’t ever think of it again.’

I hope he didn’t. I never did.

* * * *

Sunday was another out-of-kilter day. After the bustle and appointments of the day before, it felt empty. Empty for me, anyway; Mimi was kept busy answering the telephone. No one, apparently, wanted to come by, because they weren’t sure what shape I was in. But they wanted to express concern. Mimi said most of the callers sounded frightened.

I hunched on the couch, hearing the reassuring murmur of Mimi’s voice in the background. I stared in front of me with an awful emptiness echoing through my whole body.
Emma
lay open on my lap, but I never turned a page. This crisis was too evil for gentle Jane.

I had always been healthy, so physical pain was new to me, and shocking. I couldn’t move without a reminder of what had happened to me, though it was never far enough from my thoughts to make that necessary. The rape happened to me over and over again, that Sunday.

I discovered many things.

I discovered that pain requiring vengeance is very different from accepted pain. The misery of my father’s death now seemed equivalent to the coldest grimmest day of winter, perhaps after an ice storm, when every forward step is shaky. But this pain had pinned me in the middle of the forehead, branding me with a sizzling
V
for victim.

I discovered I wanted to know his face. I wanted to seize that face in my hands and rip it, cause pain, draw blood. I wanted to say, ‘See!
This
is what you did to me!’ I wanted to hang him naked and conscious in a public place, and say again,
‘See! This is what you did to me!’
And I would never be able to do it.

But still I wanted that face, and I swore to find it. I swore before I went into the bathroom to look in the mirror for the first time.

I discovered then that my face was finally my own. I would never see or think of it as a separate thing again. I would also never again think of myself as beautiful. Even after the skin healed, even when the bruises faded.

I wanted to know his face.

* * * *

I went back to classes on Monday. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done.

Two days had started the healing but made the discoloration of the bruises more lurid. At least my clothes covered my ribs and stomach. If any student at Houghton College, any resident of Knolls, had wondered who the rape victim was, they would wonder no longer.

That was why I had been beaten; so everyone would know.

As I left the shelter of the house, it occurred to me that any man I saw, any man I knew, might be the one who’d done this to me. He could examine his handiwork; he would be pleased with what he’d done to my face.

And he might be furious that I was apparently going to go on with my life. As that new fear occurred to me, my courage faltered. I clasped my books closer to my chest, as if they could protect me. My feet dragged. I was desperately tempted to turn back to the house, to hide myself from his eyes.

‘No no no,’ I swore out loud, and slapped my chest with the books. Going back to the house today could easily – so easily – be the first step toward shutting myself in it for the rest of my life. I would not, could not, do it. That would give him what he wanted, on a platter. I’d felt that in his rage.

But more than that I did not know. Even under a requestioning by the tired detectives, I couldn’t think of anything tangible to tell them, except that the man was white, solidly built . . . his weight had not been light on me; don’t think don’t think . . . and he had said he might come back.

‘Common threat. Don’t worry about it. They never do,’ Detective Tendall had reassured me. He hadn’t looked at me as he said it.

Never? Tendall was fudging just a wee bit, I decided. Just a wee bit. So as not to scare me.

Here came a girl, a student. I was approaching her and would pass her. I looked neither to the left nor the right. I heard the sharp gasp as the girl went by.

Beautiful sidewalk, white and even.

In a few hours my classes will be over and I can go back home legitimately, I thought. I will study and I will take another shower and I will not think about Friday night. I will take a pain pill and I will sleep without dreams.

During that longest walk to class, as I caught the faces of those who passed me from the corners of my eyes, a film of that night played over and over in my head: the hand clamping over my mouth, the pillow over my face, the beating, the rape, the pain in Mimi’s face. Over and over, as my feet moved forward, I relived that night. The projector in my mind was running that movie continuously, and I had no means to switch it off. I wondered if I would always watch that movie; the audible tortured thudding of my own heart on the soundtrack, the visual shaft of moonlight, the intangible presence of death.

I must’ve seen it ten times before I reached my classroom. I glimpsed Theo Cochran during one of the intermissions. He nodded to me silently, solemnly, from his desk beyond the open door to his office. He knew. I nodded stiffly back, the screen jumped, the movie sped on.

My tunnel vision was serving me well. But I felt the silence in the classroom as I entered; so different from the silence of admiration that had greeted me the first day. Led Zeppelin T-shirt wouldn’t whistle at me now. I sat like a stone at my desk. I heard the sound of the class bell, then the belated footsteps of Dr Haskell, half a minute late as he’d been ever since the first day. Those footfalls stopped short in the doorway. He had seen me. Then they resumed at a staccato pace to his lectern, and he entered my tunnel of sight. He was white. Every line in his face was deeper, all those grooves and seams etched into the flesh. He started to say something. He looked away.

Go on and speak, I begged him silently. Mention it. If you acknowledge it, it won’t be so bad.

But the Stan Haskell who couldn’t tolerate seeing even his lover after she’d been assaulted wasn’t going to speak. To borrow from Cully’s simile, he was going to pretend he didn’t notice the gigantic green wart on my face.

That might have made some women feel better. It scared the hell out of me. If other people pretended it hadn’t happened, I’d be left alone watching that movie in the dark.

‘In our last class . . .’ Stan Haskell began jerkily.

And there I was. Alone in the dark. A restricted audience; and no popcorn.

* * * *

Barbara Tucker was waiting for me in the hall after class. She flinched when we were face-to-face. I was getting used to that. She drew herself together and laid her hand on my arm. I felt movement on either side; my classmates were departing very slowly, passing me reluctantly, as if they wanted to stop. Stan Haskell had brushed by as soon as he could, casting one unreadable glance at us.