The screen door swung shut with a muffled wooden bang, and darkness opened up behind me. The well-lit inside world disappeared as I turned toward the uncertain night and made a quick calculation. I had read that many rapes happen on college campuses. Better to walk up the street, I reasoned, avoid the shadowed campus.
My thoughts traveled ahead, along the deserted but well-lit streets, to where I would turn left, onto the short cross-street, and knock on the door of the frat house on the edge of campus where I had a friend renting a room for the summer.
My thoughts looked back, toward what I fled: a familiar house, my boyfriend’s house. I had spent the evening as usual, in a circle of shared music, enjoying my role as quiet center. Using my driver’s license, I methodically cleaned weed on the lap-altar of an open album cover, like Psyche sorting seeds by the hearth, then filled and offered the pipe to each guest in turn. It was a ritual I knew well and relished, a role I would be sad to give up: being Eric’s girlfriend.
Then, after all our friends had left, my boyfriend of three years hit me. No, that’s not true, I thought. Eric didn’t hit me. He had shoved me, pushed me hard so that I fell back on the bed. I knew I should not stay for that, so I left. That was not the woman I wanted to be. It was an impulsive decision, based as much on “should do” as self-protection. It was arguably the right decision, but as soon as that door closed, I doubted it. I stood there on the covered porch with the echo of the screen door’s slam. I couldn’t go back in, to known violence, known wrongs, so I hurried up the sidewalk, passing from street light to street light.
I moved alertly from one pool of light to another, up the street, this street in a sketchy but friendly old neighborhood bordering my small college campus. I had walked at night before, and rather liked it. I loved the quiet, the emptiness, the night sounds. Streaks of reflected light outlined cars parked along the sidewalks. Porch lights were off and windows were dark. A dog barked, just once, as I passed another unlit house. I thought I heard an owl.
My friend at the frat house was the reason for the fight. The real reason, at least. My relationship with Eric was fading and dying, we both knew; togetherness survived now on habits formed by three years of shared adolescent life. He had noticed me in high school, a quiet girl a year behind him, and I had joined his social circle. I followed him to the local liberal arts college, where I continued my career as a perfect student. I began to flourish, encouraged by my teachers and new acquaintances who talked about art and philosophy and played their own music. In that new circle, I met Tom. He had pale blue eyes and jet black hair and studied philosophy on scholarship, like me. Tom was my new crush. And if I was honest with myself — which I occasionally was — he was my way out.
My thoughts returned to Eric. He wasn’t drunk tonight, and neither was I. We never drank much. He was hurting, I told myself, and with reason. I was the reason. He didn’t hit me… My meticulous conscience almost forgave him for a second. But none of that. Go forward, don’t go back. My resolve, my sensibilities, and a desire to see Tom kept me walking. I reached wide Northwest Street, at the top of the hill, and turned right on the sidewalk under more yellow street lights.
Few cars were out this late at night. There were locusts whirring in the stately southern trees of the dark campus across the street, and crickets singing in the tall grass on my right along the cracked sidewalk. OK, I was calmer now, I would be there soon. The night was warm, the sultry air pleasantly warm on my bare legs. It was only mid-May, but already summer in Jackson. Hot enough for cut-off shorts and embroidered cotton gauze, a white tunic thin enough to let the night breeze through to touch my arms. I carried a crocheted bag over one shoulder as I clumped along in my wooden-heeled sandals. One set of headlights shone up behind me and then passed away in the distance, over a hill.
I passed CS’s, the student bar I didn’t frequent but where I once ate a good soul food lunch. It was dark, like the houses. Must be later than I realized. I continued past a grassy overgrown lot with a wooden sign: future site of SouthTrust bank. Almost to the corner.
For a couple of minutes, I had been watching a figure approach, far ahead on the same sidewalk, on the same side of the street, walking alone from the opposite direction. At first I thought it was Tom. He was slim, like Tom, and about the same height, and wore a familiar-seeming red T-shirt. I squinted at him, gave the figure my attention. Later I wondered if that attention drew him to me. As the distance between us lessened, I saw it was not my friend, and I felt I should cross the street. I was almost at the corner anyway, so I left the sidewalk and headed crosswise toward the other side, toward the perpendicular sidewalk, the last little leg of my short night-time journey.
Let me lick your pussy. What? I was in the middle of the street now, halfway across, and the figure now almost reaching me said something. What? At first I thought maybe he needed help. I stopped for a second to process what he said.
Fear grabbed me just before he grabbed my arm. Scream and I’ll kill you, he said. Panic closed my throat. His grip pulled my arm and I stood frozen under the yellow light. Another car drove past, and I looked into the puzzled eyes of a middle-aged woman, about the age of my mother. What did that woman make of the two figures, a young woman with a stricken face and a slim man holding her arm as if to pull her across the street? Did she think I was a prostitute, I would wonder years later. The car continued without slowing.
I remember next a swirling yellow-lit confusion — tunnel vision and flashing lights and paralyzing panic like that time I freaked out on the Ferris wheel.
Now we were in the tall weeds, in the tall grass and gravel of the empty lot, away from the street lights. As the world slowed its movement around me, confusion narrowed into clarity. What I saw: my own dead body. I was one of those discarded nude females you see now and then on the local news. My thoughts moved more slowly now, adjusting to the dark like my eyes.
Everyone would see, when the daylight came, everyone would hear my name in the announcer’s voice. Everyone who knew me in high school, in junior high, would hear my name on the local news and remember me this way, a lonely naked dead girl in an empty lot. I felt embarrassed. My mind wandered to the sky, examined the stars in a piece of night framed by dark branches overhead.
He didn’t like it when I cried. That seemed to bother him. Later, I wouldn’t remember clearly everything that happened. Hideous thoughts, hard to construct and hold in memory, and ugly words like “penetration.” Frustrated by my crying, he wanted me to go down on him. I don’t think I did that. I told him I couldn’t make him come that way, isn’t that what you want? and so he told me to do it with my hand. I did. I was realizing he might let me go, and I wanted to get away. I just wanted to get away. I’m not looking at your face, I said. I can’t identify you.
He wiped off my hand with his shirt. He told me to give him my driver’s license, and I took it out of the crocheted purse. He warned me that if I told anyone what happened, he would find me. I don’t remember what he said he would do, just the fear. He told me to stay where I was, not move. I don’t remember if he said how long.
He left, disappeared into the night neighborhood in his red shirt, carrying my license, with its resin-darkened edges and an old address. Later, I would hate that he possessed my name and a photo of my face. I would hate his memory of what he had done. It felt like he owned a part of me.
I sat, terrified and confused but not dead. I wasn’t dead! I got up, suddenly re-panicked, suddenly shaken back into my life. I zipped up my shorts and began to run, ran across the street and onto that sidewalk that led along fraternity row to the last house, the third one on the left. I passed a young man who saw my frightened face and asked hey…? but I didn’t stop.
Every window of the house was dark. No one answered my knocking. How long had I been in that vacant lot? I saw a crack in one of the small square windowpanes that bordered either side of the doorframe. It was OK, this was an emergency. I broke out the pane with my palm, sending a shock of high-pitched shattering glass out into the neighborhood. Somewhere, a disembodied voice on a nearby street — a police car’s loudspeaker? — asked What was that? It’s OK, I told myself, the police should come.
Later, I couldn’t believe I fit my body through that tiny window. Inside, I fled up the wide carpeted stairs, to Tom’s room, his voice in the dark, my voice panicked, crying again, telling him I had been attacked. Are you hurt? I said no.
As we sat on a couch downstairs, by the light of a street lamp outside an un-curtained window, he told me I should call the police. I refused, having read about how rape victims are treated. I could tell he didn’t know what to do, how to help. Strangely, this calmed me. I wanted to help him.
I agreed to talk to one of the two uniformed women who worked campus security. Tom walked with me along sidewalks and through large patches of tree shadow to the security office, where we found only a uniformed man. He was kind, listened and wrote down what I said. I was not very clear, not very sure what had happened. Memories refused to form in my head, as I tried to piece together the story, tried to be a witness to my own rape.
A man, in a red shirt and a knit cap. Thin, no not very tall. The corner of Northwest and Marshall Street. Not sure what time, not sure how long. Pulled me into the weeds. Was I raped?
Was I? I thought to myself. I couldn’t remember if there was “real sex.” Did what I did remember count as rape? These questions with obvious answers would puzzle my older self, but in that moment, confused and young and just glad to be out of the weeds and the dark, I wasn’t sure what had happened or how to name it, not sure enough to be a very good witness.
Back on the couch in the dark by the open window, I sat with Tom, and I offered to let him touch my breasts, because I thought he wanted to. He smiled, but his hands didn’t move. We sat silent. Then, headlights outside, a familiar red car. Eric came to find me. To fetch me.
He had been to campus security, looking for me, learned that a girl had been raped, or maybe raped, pulled into the weeds at least. I climbed dutifully into his car, and we were silent all the way home? I don’t remember if he asked if I was OK. He probably did, he was a good person, and he loved me. He had come to search for me, out of concern, but I felt chastened rather than loved. I had been bad, been naughty, been foolish, and gotten caught for my own foolishness, punished for walking out of the safe house and into the scary night. I remember no apologies from either side. I didn’t cry again.
Later, many years later, I would tell the story of the empty lot over and over, until the memories finally began to stay in place. Was my experience even counted?
A couple of days after, the head of campus security had called me to his office, tried to know what had happened. I wasn’t very good at explaining, and I didn’t know what I wanted anyway, except to forget and move on. I will leave it up to you to tell your parents. Damn right, I spoke inside my head, my internal rebellion fiercer than my self-advocacy. It wasn’t his right to tell. I was 18, after all. His voice implied dishonor, or I inferred it. I will let you tell your parents of your despoiling. I sat quietly until he let me go.
I never told my parents. I feared they might insist I move back home, leave the dorm where they thought I slept and my boyfriend’s house where I spent my nights for a few more weeks until I got my own little house and Tom moved in. After the dorm meeting advising female students not to walk at night, there were rumors around campus about the girl who was attacked. Maybe the whispering voices knew it was me, maybe they wondered, maybe they knew nothing. I talked about it out loud once, in the grille, and probably someone overheard. I didn’t care, or acted like I didn’t.
I walked along wearing a numb brave face. School, graduation, new boyfriends. A Master’s degree and my first real job. Death moved quietly behind my back in parking lots, seized my ankle in dreams, occasionally caressed me through a lover’s hand. Memories stalked me in dark places and in dreams, where I had no control. I learned to anesthetize myself — intellectualization came easily, and denial is a powerful drug — but there were side effects. I tranquilized intimacy along with terror.
The numbness carried me through nine years. One day, seeking help for stubborn headaches, I found myself telling the story of the walk and the weeds and the shattering glass and the drive home. I began to tell the story again and again, told it over and over in a quiet office, in a parked car, in a circle of women. I picked through the pieces, sorting and sifting until the story formed and the memories stuck and I could let it be part of my self. I took it in, breathed it in, and eventually began to breathe out again.
I grieved and pondered and analyzed and cried, forgave myself and blamed myself and forgave myself again, and all the while the anger grew, the hatred and anger and grief, until I conjured an atom bomb, a mushroom cloud, that blew it all away, engulfed it all in flames, burned it clean, killed his memory of what he did but kept my own — MY memory, MY story, clean and purged and purified and mine alone. Only bones remain, clean white bones for my altar.
I don’t look over my shoulder much anymore, and the nightmares crept back into their caverns to waste away. My lover’s hands belong to him alone. The weedy lot has long since been paved over more than once. I hardly ever hear my name on the news, hardly ever see my dead body in the ghost weeds where an empty bank building now stands and cars drive by like nothing happened.
