Lucky (7 page)

The year I turned fifteen my mother decided my birthday present would be a trip to New York. I think she worked herself up to go by pretending my excitement about it would keep her from collapse.

On the Amtrak train up from Philadelphia, she began to have a version of her panic. The dreaded flap. It grew worse as we sped toward New York. I was so excited to be going but as she rocked back and forth in her seat and her hands trembled—one on her right temple and one rubbing the space between her breasts—I decided we should go home.

"We'll come another time, Mom," I said. "It's okay."

She argued. "But we're on our way. You want this so much." Then, "Let me try."

She pushed herself. She fought to function normally. We should have turned back when we reached Penn Station. Both of us probably knew this. She was a mess. She couldn't walk upright. She had wanted to walk up from Penn Station to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Eighty-second and Fifth so we could see the shops and Central Park along the way. She had spent the weeks before planning it. Told me that on Forty-fourth was the Algonquin, and that I would get to see the Ritz and the Plaza, where she was sure my idol, Merman, often stayed. Maybe we would take a ride in a hansom cab around Central Park and see the famous apartment building, the Dakota. Bergdorf's and Lexington. The theater district, where Merman's musicals were playing. My mother wanted to stand in front of Sherman's statue and, as a daughter of the South, say a silent prayer. The duck pond, the carousel, the old men with their model sailboats. It was my mother's gift.

But she couldn't walk. We stood in the cab line out on Seventh Avenue and got in one.

She could not sit up straight. She kept her head between her knees so she would not throw up. She said, "I'm taking my daughter to the Met."

"You all right, lady?" the cab driver asked.

"Yes," she said. She implored me to look out the window. "This is New York," she said as she stared at the dirty floor of the cab.

I don't remember the drive up save for crying. Trying to do what she said. The buildings and people were a blur to me. "I'm not going to make it," she began saying. "I want to, Alice, but I'm not going to make it."

The cab driver was relieved to reach the Met. At first my mother stayed in the backseat.

"Mom, let's just turn around and go hack," I pleaded.

"In or out?" the cab driver said. "What's the story?"

We got out. We crossed the street. In front of us were the monumental steps up to the entrance of the Met. I was trying to look around and take it in. I wanted to run up those steps thronged with people smiling and taking pictures. Slowly, with me leading my bent-over mother, we made it up some twenty stairs.

"I have to sit down," she said. "I can't go in."

We were so close.

"Mom," I said, "we made it, we have to go in."

"You go in," she said.

My fragile suburban mother sat in her good dress on the hot cement, rubbing her chest and trying not to throw up.

"I can't go in without you," I said.

She opened her purse and took a twenty from her wallet. She shoved it in my hand. "Run into the gift shop and buy yourself something," she said. "I want you to have a souvenir of the trip."

I left her there. I did not look back at her smallness on the steps. In the gift shop I was overwhelmed and twenty dollars didn't buy much. I saw a book called
Dada and the Art
of Surrealism
for $8.95. I rushed back out after paying for it. People had surrounded my mother and were trying to help. There was no pretending now.

"Can we help you in some way?" a West German man and his concerned wife asked in perfect English.

My mother ignored them. The Sebolds did everything themselves.

"Alice," she said, "you need to flag a cab, I can't do it."

"Mom, I don't know how," I said.

"Go to the edge of the sidewalk and stick your hand out," she said. "One will stop."

I left her and did as I was told. An old bald man in a yellow Checker cab pulled up. I explained that my mother was the one on the steps. I pointed to her. "Could you help?"

"What's wrong with her? She sick? I don't want sick people in my cab," he said with a heavy Yiddish accent.

"She's just nervous," I said. "She won't throw up. I can't move her by myself."

He helped me. After living in New York as an adult I know how rare this was. But something about my desperation and, to be honest, my mother, he felt sorry for. We made it to the cab and while I sat in the backseat my mother lay down at my feet on the old Checker's big back floor.

The cabbie kept up the kind of patter you pray for. "You just stretch out there, missus,"

he said. "I wouldn't drive one of those new cabs. Checkers are the only kind of cab for me. Roomy. Makes people feel comfortable. How old are you, young lady? You look a lot like your mother, you know that?"

On the train ride home my mother's panic gave way to utter exhaustion. My father picked us up at the station and once we got home, she went immediately to her room. I was glad we were on vacation at school. I would have time to make up a good story.

On the day of the rape, I lay across the backseat of the car and tried to sleep while my mother drove. I did so fitfully. The interior of the car was blue, and I pretended I was on the ocean, floating out to sea. But the closer we got to home, the more I thought about my father.

I had learned early that if I interrupted him in his study I had better have something that would dissipate his anger at being disturbed. I often played myself off my more serious sister. I tried to be a bawdy boy for the benefit of a man who lived in a house where he often complained he was "outnumbered by females." (My father took great joy in their new dog—a poodle mix—openly declaring how good it was to finally have another male in the house.) I wanted to be the child I had always been for my father.

My mother and I pulled into the driveway and walked into the house through the garage.

My father is a tall man and I knew him best as a man obsessed with his work—with editing, writing, and speaking Spanish on the phone with colleagues and friends. But that day he was shaking when I saw him at the end of the long hall in the back entranceway of our house.

"Hey, Dad," I said.

Mom followed down the long hall. I saw him look quickly up at her and then focus, or try to focus, on me as I advanced.

We hugged each other. We were awkward, ill-fitting.

I don't remember him saying anything to me. If he did say, "Oh, honey, it's good to have you home," or, "Alice, I love you," it would have been so uncharacteristic that I think I would have remembered it, but perhaps I don't remember it for that very reason. I did not want new experience. I wanted what I knew, the house I had left that fall for the first time in my life, and the father I recognized.

"How you doing, Dad?" I asked. I had thought of this simple question all the way home.

With flushed relief, he said, "After your mother called, I had five shots of whiskey and I've never been more sober in my life."

I lay down on the couch in the family room. My father, in an effort to stay busy that morning, had prepared some lunch fixings in the kitchen.

"Would you like something to eat?" he asked me.

In my response, I wished to slam-dunk the fact that no one needed to worry about this tough customer.

"That would be nice," I said, "considering the only thing I've had in my mouth in the last twenty-four hours is a cracker and a cock."

To the outsider this might sound awful; to my father, standing in the doorway of the kitchen, and to my mother, who was fussing with our bags, it both shocked them and meant only one thing: The kid they knew was still there.

"Jesus, Alice," my father responded. He was waiting there on the precipice for my directions.

"I'm still me, Dad," I said.

My parents went into the kitchen together. I don't know how long they spent in there, putting together sandwiches that were, probably, already made. What did they do? Did they hug? I can't imagine this, but they might have. Did my mother whisper details about the police and my physical condition, or did she promise she would tell him what she knew after I slept?

My sister had made it through finals. The day following my homecoming, when my parents went to pick her up in Philadelphia and pack her things for the summer, I went too.

My face was still bruised. My father drove one car and my mother drove the other. The plan was that I would stay in the car while the three of them loaded my sister's things. I was only there for my sister to see, so she would know immediately that I was okay. I also went because I didn't want them alone together and talking about me.

I rode up front with my mother. She preferred to take a local route into the city. It took longer, but we all agreed it was more scenic. Of course the real reason was that the Schuylkill Expressway, known unofficially as the Surekill by those along the Main Line of Philadelphia, was guaranteed to bring on a flap. So we took Route 30, then snaked along various secondary roads toward our ultimate goal of U-Penn.

Over time, the abandoned tracks of the Philadelphia El came to mark the official entrance into the city for me. It was here that pedestrian traffic began, where a man sold papers to drivers from the middle of the road, and a Baptist church played host, year-round, to weddings and funerals whose attendees spread out into the streets in formal clothes.

I had taken this trip many times with my mother. We would meet my father at his office or use the faculty-insurance services through the University of Pennsylvania Hospital. A regular aspect of these trips was my mother's increasing anxiety as we drew closer and closer to the city. Down Chestnut Street, once past the El, my mother always drove in the middle lane of three lanes on the oneway road. My job was to sit in the passenger seat and anticipate an attack.

The day we went to pick up my sister, the dynamic shifted. Once past the blocks of row houses, alternating block by block in terms of how well maintained they were, the street widened. Abandoned buildings, seedy gas stations, and government brick buildings lined the street. Occasionally, one or two still-standing row houses clung together in the midst of a block.

In the past, on these drives, I had focused on the buildings; I liked the stair notches in the sides of the remaining row houses, seeing them as the fossils of former lives. Now, my focus shifted. So did my mother's. In the car behind us, I would realize soon, so had my father's. It shifted to the people on the streets. Not the women, not the children.

It was hot. Hot in the humid, dank way of Northeastern cities during summer. The smell of trash and exhaust fumes seeped through the open windows of our un-air-conditioned car. Our ears perked up at random shouts. We listened for menace in the greetings of friend to friend, and my mother questioned why so many men were clustered at street corners and slouched in front of buildings. This part of Philadelphia, excepting a diminishing Italian population, was black.

We passed a corner where three men stood. Behind them, two older men sat in rickety folding chairs, brought out onto the sidewalk to escape the heat inside their homes. I could sense my mother's body tense beside me. The bruises and cuts on my face stung. I felt that every man on that street could see me, that every man knew.

"I feel sick," I said to my mother.

"We're almost there."

"It's weird, Mom," I said, as I tried to stay calm. I knew the old men hadn't raped me. I knew the tall black man in a green suit, sitting on a bus-station bench, hadn't raped me. I was still afraid.

"What's weird, Alice?" She began to knead her knuckles into her chest.

"How I feel like I've lain underneath all these men."

"That's ridiculous, Alice."

We had stopped at a light. When it turned green, we accelerated. But we were going slowly enough so that my eyes lingered on the upcoming corner.

He was there, back from the street and squatting on the cement, leaning against the clean brick of a newish building. I met his eyes. He met mine. "I've lain with you," I said inside my head.

It was an early nuance of a realization that would take years to face. I share my life not with the girls and boys I grew up with, or the students I went to Syracuse with, or even the friends and people I've known since. I share my life with my rapist. He is the husband to my fate.

We passed out of that neighborhood and into the world of the University of Pennsylvania, where my sister lived. Doors were open in the houses that rented to students, and U-Hauls and Ryder trucks were double-parked along the curb. Someone had come up with the idea to throw a move-out-day keg party. Tall white boys in muscle tees, or no shirts at all, sat on couches on the sidewalk and drank beer from plastic cups.

My mother and I made our way to my sister's dorm and parked.

My father arrived a moment later and parked his car nearby. I stayed in the car. My mother, trying to hide a flap from me, had gotten out and was pacing nearby.

This was what I heard my father say before my mother shot him a warning look.

"Did you see those goddamn animals hanging off of every post and—"

My mother looked quickly at me and then back at my father. "Hush, Bud," she said.

He came over to me and bent down into the window.

"Are you okay, Alice?"

"I'm fine, Dad," I said.

He was sweaty and red-faced. Helpless. Afraid. I had never heard him refer to blacks like this, or to any other minority by condemning them as a group.

My father went in to tell my sister we had arrived. I sat in the car with my mother. We didn't talk. I watched the activities of move-out day. Students used large canvas bins, like those to shuttle mail in the back rooms of post offices, to heap their possessions in. They rolled them across the parking lot to their parents' cars. Families greeted one another. On a scrubby patch of lawn two boys played Frisbee. Radios blared from the windows of my sister's dorm. There was freedom and release in the air; summer like an infection, spreading across the campus.