Lucky (11 page)

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.

In my senior year of high school, I had applied to three colleges: Syracuse University, Emerson College in Boston, and the University of Pennsylvania, where I was supposed to have gotten in, a cinch as a faculty child. I did not want to go to Penn, or at least that's how I remember it. I had watched my sister move in and then quickly out of a dorm on Penn's campus, bring her possessions back to my parents' house, and commute her first year. If I had to go to college—which I spent the better part of four years in high school saying I didn't want to do—I wanted it to have the benefit of being far away.

My parents humored me; they were desperate for me to go to college. They saw it as an essential gateway, the thing that had changed their own lives, particularly my father's.

Neither of his parents had finished high school and the shame of this was like an ache to him; his academic achievements were fueled by a need to distance himself from his mother's bad grammar and his father's drunken dirty jokes.

In my junior year of high school, my father and I visited Emerson, where long-haired students he called "throwbacks" advised me on how to break what they saw as oppressive rules.

"You aren't supposed to have any electrical appliances," said the resident assistant of the dorm we toured. He had dark brown dirty hair and a scruffy beard. To me, he looked like John the bus driver, who had driven me to school during junior high and had dropped out of high school. Both these boys had the smell of true, authentic rebellion. They reeked of pot.

"I got a toaster oven and a hair dryer," this John boasted, pointing toward a grease-coated toaster oven wedged into a set of handmade shelves. "Never use 'em at the same time, that's the trick."

Though amused, my father was also shocked by this boy, his mangy looks, his position of authority in the dorms. My father may have been divided. Emerson had the reputation of being an arty school in a town of monoliths like Harvard and MIT. Even Boston University, whose campus we also visited and which my father praised, was far above Emerson's place on the food chain. But I liked Emerson. I liked how when we drove up to it and saw the sign, two of the letters were missing from it. This was my kind of place. I felt I could learn not to make toast and dry my hair at the same time.

That night I had fun with my father. This is a rare event. My father does not have hobbies, wouldn't recognize a ball sport if the ball hit him in the head, and there are no cronies, there are only colleagues. The reason for relaxation of any kind is largely beyond him. "Fun is boring," he told me as a child when I attempted to coax him into playing a board game I had set up on the floor. It became one of his favorite phrases. He meant it.

But I'd always had a hint that my father could be different away from us and away from my mother. That he had fun in other countries or with his male graduate students. I liked to get my father alone, and on the trip to Emerson, he and I shared a hotel room to save money.