The Women's Room (78 page)

After a time, Val realized what had happened: she had offended Fetor and he had refused to handle the case. Karman had been warned about her. She laughed out loud suddenly and Karman glanced at her uneasily:
she
had offended Fetor!

The questioning ended, the lawyer left saying he would be back. Then a group of men came in arguing with each other. They were police. A piece of procedure had been forgotten. Chris had not identified the boy. The boy was not there, he had to be picked up, identification had to be made from a lineup. There were comings and goings, but mostly waiting. The afternoon sun was growing weaker. The dogs kept barking. Some policemen came into the room and brusquely ordered Chris downstairs. Val followed.

‘In there,’ a cop pointed.

‘Oh, no, you don’t!’ Val exclaimed. They all looked at her. They had already heard about her, she could see.

‘You can’t make her go into the same room with him without a screen,’ she said. ‘That’s the law.’

They turned away from her and gave Chris a little push.

‘Chris!’ Val cried, but Chris turned to her with a blank hostile stare,
and went inside. Val was standing behind her, and the police barred the doorway, as if she would have gone into the room with Chris. Val looked in. Chris stood with her back to Val. There were six black boys in the lineup. One cop rapped out orders to them.

‘Right! Front! Left!’

The boys turned. They seemed listless, except in the muscles of their arms, the cut of some of their backs. They already knew, she thought. She would have rushed toward the cop and struck him if he had talked to her that way. But then she was privileged, white, and female. They would only have knocked her out, or pinned her arms and taken her to the insane asylum. They would have different methods for these boys. The boys turned. The police – all that she had seen that day – were white. The boys had blank faces. They did not dare even to look their hate.

Chris said something to one cop, then came out and slid her arm through her mother’s. Val understood and Chris knew that she had understood. You must let me get on with this, Chris was saying. I must finish this business. Until I do, I will be afraid to walk out on the street. Let me do what I have to do. I don’t care if it is legal or not.

They walked back up to the locker room.

After a time, Karman came to them and said he advised dropping the charges. Chris was stunned. They argued for over an hour. It seemed the boy claimed she had been willing. Karman said that as if somehow it was final, as if it had gone to the highest court and been decided. Unfortunately, he explained, Chris had not been stabbed. She had some bad bruises, he believed (he checked his notes) – at least so she claimed. The best they could do in any case, since she had not been stabbed, was to charge battery, for which the boy would get six months. But the boy was adamant in his story that she was his friend, and he doubted they could make the charge stick. It was best not to put her through it, he kept advising Val, not looking at Chris. Chris had the same glazed stare; she did not seem to understand what was really being said. The boy was coming up for trial on two other charges of battery, and one of rape – that time there had been some nice clean knife wounds – and he would no doubt be sent to jail anyway.

Chris gazed at him. ‘No,’ she said.

The lawyer argued and argued. Chris just said no. The lawyer said he didn’t want to handle it.

‘If you don’t,’ Val stormed, ‘I’ll get civil counsel and prosecute the
government. Or maybe the best thing for me would be to buy a gun and shoot the kid so my daughter can feel safe on the streets.’

He laughed uneasily. He was sure – fairly sure – that she would never shoot anybody. He was graceful, conciliatory, but he kept arguing. And Chris kept saying no. He kept looking to Val, but Val would not budge. She would not say one word to try to influence Chris. And Chris said no.

‘Okay,’ he sighed finally. It was ironic, Val thought. He was reluctant to try the case for Chris’s sake: because he did not want to see her humiliated in the trial. So completely did he believe the boy. The boy had not challenged any of the details. He did not deny that he had jumped out at her from between two cars, that he had thrown her down. No one asked to see Chris’s bruises, but she had a number of them, a large deep one on her shoulder, where several layers of skin had been scraped away, and one along her spine, not large but deep and bloody. No one questioned any of that. And Val thought that only a male could believe that a woman approached in that way could actually enjoy it, could find her will in the rapist’s. She’d read such things too, in novels by men. Submission. Yes, that they might get. Kings, emperors, slavemasters, got it too. And wiliness. Isn’t that what women and slaves are known for?

Her mind was wandering. Chris led her into the courtroom. Chris sat her down and put her arm around her. She was muttering. In the courtroom she could not smoke, and smoking was all that had been holding her together. She kept muttering. All around them there were men: cops, lawyers, criminals, victims. They watched the proceedings and Val began to mutter more loudly. Heads began to turn. There was a striking difference between the judge’s and lawyer’s treatment of blacks and whites: it was so obvious that Val wondered it did not rise of its own strength in the middle of the room and stifle them all.

‘Sexist pigs,’ she said, then ‘Racists!’ Chris had her arm around her, she was patting her gently.

‘It’s okay, Mommy,’ she whispered in Val’s ear.

‘Kill, kill, kill! That’s the only thing you can do! There are too many of them,’ she confided in Chris. ‘There’s no way you can take them on singly. You need weapons. Kill!’

Chris kissed her, and laid her cheek against her mother’s.

‘We’ll have to bomb them. It’s the only thing,’ Val said. ‘We have to get them all in a bunch. All at once.’

Their case was called. Word was sent to bring the boy in. Their
lawyer came over to them one last time. He had a kind face, he was concerned. But he was still a sexist pig. Val kept her hands over her lips as he spoke so she would not shout it at him. Chris had Val’s elbow clutched tightly in her hand. She was begging her mother not to do it. Val then heard what the lawyer was saying: he was warning them both against the humiliation Chris was just now going to endure. He was trying to soften it, but at the same time saying that they had brought it on themselves. ‘You’re sure you want to go through with this?’ he asked Val. ‘We can still call it off.’

Val took her hand away from her mouth. Her mouth was twisted with hate. ‘A little black meat, that’s the way you say it in the back room, no?’

The lawyer looked shocked. He gazed at her with loathing.

‘Well, if she’d wanted to screw a little black meat, she could have done it in a nice soft bed in her own apartment. She didn’t have to get all bruised up in the street. If you think it’s her virginity or her chastity we’re concerned about, forget it. We’re fighting for her safety, for her right to exist in this world. A world full of
you
. Men!’ She stopped. His face was incredulous and horrified. His forehead was wrinkled. He thought she was insane perhaps, hideous certainly, and evil without a doubt. But he was a pro. He walked back to the bar and went through his papers. The public defender, a large, red-faced Irishman, asked: ‘Who’s the next one?’ and Karman murmured an answer.

‘Oh, Mick!’ he laughed. It was all there in his laugh: the wicked little glint in the eye, the knowingness, the pleasure. We all know about cunt, much as the little prisses try to pretend. ‘Come on, you’re not going to try this one, are you?’ he smiled at Karman. ‘You got to be kidding. This chick had hot pants.’

The boy was brought out. He was young. He looked no more than nineteen, but was twenty-one. He had a sweet baby face. He was larger than Chris, and more muscular, but he was far from a giant. He glanced briefly at Chris, but she did not look at him. She looked tiny and frail standing there all hunched over, her long hair hanging about her thin face, her eyes sunken in.

The judge asked Chris what happened, and briefly, she told her story. The Irish lawyer stood behind his client, his profile to the courtroom. He was grinning broadly.

The judge turned to the boy. The public defender had his file in his hand, and was ready to open it, to contest the accusation. He was all ready.

‘And how do you plead?’ the judge asked the boy.

‘Guilty,’ the boy said.

It was over. Both lawyers were surprised, but they folded their files up calmly. Only Chris did not move. She waited until the judge had sentenced the boy to six months for battery, and then she said, in a faltering little voice, that she had expected more of American justice, that she had been studying it for years and had intended to make it her life’s work and what she had encountered today had crushed every notion she had had. She was little and looked very young and her voice was high and unsure, and they let her finish and the judge slammed his gavel for the next case, and they paid no attention whatever to her. What was she, after all?

Chris came shaking back to her mother. It was over. Justice was done. A black boy who had believed everything his culture had taught him and had acted on it was to go to jail for six months. Of course, there were other charges pending against him. He might spend his life in jail. And he would go in bitter hurt and hate. She had said she was his friend and he had believed her. Like all other men, he had been betrayed by a woman. He would not remember the rest, the jumping out at her, the hand on her throat. He would remember only that she had played him for a fool and he had believed her. Someday, perhaps, because of Chris, he would kill a woman.

Val sat there remembering that downstairs she had felt sorry for the black boys in the lineup, knowing that such sympathy was gone in her, and that it would never return. It didn’t matter if they were black or white, or yellow, or anything else for that matter. It was males against females, and the war was to the death. Those white men would stand up there and make Chris a victim rather than disbelieve a male who was a member of a species they heartily despised. What, then, did they think about women? One of their own women? What did they see when they looked at their daughters?

She rose stiffly. Her bones felt as if all the juice in them had dried up. Chris led her out of the room as if she were a cripple; Chris somehow got them back to the hotel. Chris arranged to pay the bill and get a cab. But there was trouble with everything. The man at the desk argued about something; the cab driver yelled about the amount of their baggage; the steward on the plane yelled at Val that if her daughter did not keep her shoes on he would throw them both off the plane. And everywhere they turned they saw the broad blue pants, the gunbelts, the heavy pricks that shot real bullets, or the others, the neat, short-haired men in gabardine
suits and white shirts who looked just like the attorneys, who were ever so nice and never said shit in front of ladies and always pulled out your chair when you went to a restaurant. They even, Val kept thinking, shivering, they even had little daughters of their own, they maybe even played with them, talked to them when they were in good moods. And they had little boys. What did they teach them?

Chris took care of Val all the way home. When they were back, Chris collapsed. She curled into a ball and crept into the corner of the couch and did not speak. She could not stand to have anyone but her mother near her. She slept in her mother’s bed, but had trouble sleeping nevertheless. She kept waking up, imagining she heard strange sounds. Since she slept so badly at night, she was tired all day and napped frequently. She tried to read, but could not concentrate. She would sit for hours every day in her room with a mirror propped up before her, cutting split ends from her hair with a nail scissors. If people came – people she had loved before, Iso or Kyla, Clarissa or Mira – she would sit there absently, speaking little to the guest, snapping at her mother, or else she would retreat to her room and close the door. If Val asked for help in preparing a meal or cleaning the apartment, Chris would respond passively, sometimes obeying, but more often simply drifting off to be found, twenty minutes later, asleep in her bed.

Val took her for vd tests and a general physical. There was nothing wrong with her health. Chris went everywhere with Val, because she would neither go out or stay alone. But Val went to few places: the market, the laundry. She dropped out of all her organizations curtly, with no explanation. People kept driving up to the house to pick up stacks of mimeos, notes, pamphlets. Grimly, Val handed them the paper as if it were so much shit. The two women could do nothing. They would, on occasion, turn on TV at night, but within a minute or two there would appear a commercial, a line, a scene, a snatch of dialogue that was intolerable and without looking at each other, one of them would get up and turn it off. When Val tried to read, she would get through a few lines, then throw, literally throw the book against the wall. They could not even play music. Chris growled about rock lyrics and Val growled about Beethoven. ‘Daddy music’ she kept muttering. The entire world seemed to them polluted. When Tad stopped in one day, neither of them would even look at him.

The only person Chris wanted to see was Bart, and when he stopped by, she and Val sat with him drinking tea and Chris told him the story. His eyes filled with tears, he stared gloomily at the table, but when she
was through, he looked up and told them in dire tones how black men felt about white women, how the women were only the vehicle of their revenge against white men.

Chris and Val looked at him. He left shortly.

Val realized that it was up to her to do something, but she had no heart. She felt she had no friends left: they did not seem to understand the real meaning of what had happened. They tried to act cheerful, to talk about other things as if rape were not much more than having your house broken into and your stereo stolen. She was not angry at them; she simply didn’t want to see them. She cast around in her mind and remembered a group who had lived in the Somerville commune and had gone off, a year and a half ago, to start a communal farm in the Berkshires. They grew vegetables and herbs, had chickens and goats, a grape arbor, some bees. They made their own cheese and yoghurt, wine and honey. They spread themselves out along the main roads and sold home-baked bread, their own pottery and knitted things. They were surviving.