Denial Read online

  In any case, I did comply. I floated into docility.

  —close shades

  The shades hiding our shame.

  —take off pants. Asked if we’d still be clothed

  The pants covering our shameful spots. The vulnerable spots now exposed. Would we still be clothed? We were wearing leotards. But I know the answer to that question now: I would never be clothed again.

  —take off leotards.

  We had ridden our bikes home from ballet class, jeans over our leotards. We were unspoiled and tough, unlike other girls, the kind whose parents might have driven them across town, the kind who might have screamed.

  But now skin is revealed, legs exposed to cold air. Still, I did not scream.

  —facedown on bed

  I recall thinking that if I did what he said, we would stay alive. Don’t scream, don’t protest. I cannot recall the sensation of facedown on bed. Did the blanket scratch the cheeks and mouth, the mouth that would be good, that would not scream? Did the blankets comfort, did they suffocate?

  —made us brush each other’s hair

  —made us try on little sister’s dresses

  —too small

  —made us put on stepmother’s dresses

  —made us take off dresses

  —told us to lie facedown

  —made us sit up

  How did those dresses feel on the skin that no longer seemed like mine, the “I” that I no longer know? Did I know that soon after putting on a dress, I would have to take it off?

  I do recall “man walked in”: I can see a kind of apparition in my mind’s eye. I do recall the threat to kill us if we spoke. But now I am lost. My mind cannot focus. An apparition of cold flits across my heart but is gone so soon I wonder if I imagined it. I am annoyed with this little girl whom I’m struggling to hold in my mind’s eye, who wants me to understand how she suffered. You will be fine, I want to tell her. I feel anger at her, even more than “man walked in.” I do not want to hear about her fear or her pain. It wasn’t that bad.

  —stroke and lick penis

  —said he put gun down

  —said he could reach for it at any time

  Now I begin to feel something new. A foggy nausea takes hold, leaving no room for thoughts or action. Why didn’t I bite hard? Would it have been worth it to hurt this man, even if he killed me? Did I have the strength in my jaw to bite? I think not. I was in a sea of nothingness.

  —sit with legs spread

  Who spread those legs? How vulnerable I feel, thinking of this girl, her legs spread wide, exposed to this “man walked in,” exposed to an evil cold.

  —asked us what we called vaginas.

  —we said crotches.

  —he put his finger up me

  —had we heard of cunt?

  Yes.

  —entered me while I was sitting.

  —told me it didn’t hurt—he was sterile and clean. Two times.

  —I said it hurt

  —he said it didn’t.

  I do remember the hurt, as if someone had inserted a gun made of granite that scraped my flesh raw, at first scratching, then tearing, then scraping the flesh off bone, leaving the bone sterilized by pain.

  I am hollow and sterilized now. Not long after the rape, I lost my ability to urinate. I had to be catheterized, and later hospitalized. I began to walk with crotch held back to prevent intruders, muscles so tight I have to will myself to urinate, sometimes even now.

  Now he turned his attention to my little sister.

  —tried to rape my sister Sara

  —I told him not to, please.

  How did I find the strength to talk? I was spellbound by the potential for death contained in that gun, entranced into a statuelike calm. An animal intelligence had taken over where an “I” once held at least the illusion of dominion, where thoughts and action were once connected. The “I” was lured away into a space of infinite white, a space of no feeling other than calm, far from the human world, entranced into leaving its normal home—my body—by this man’s insistence that he would kill me if I spoke. The animal mind that took over when the “I” had gone ordered the body that remained behind to be passive, silent, and calm, knowing, in its animal way, that compliance was required to keep the body alive.

  But now there was something more important than sustaining the life of that body, something that knocked that shameless and shameful animal-mind back to its rightful place, a place I know nothing of, that I want to know nothing of, in this life. My little sister’s pain pulled me out of my trance, and an “I” returned, determined to protect her; but I don’t believe that the “I” that came back was the same “I” that my body had housed before. The new self that emerged was like a baby, having never been exposed to the world. The world felt new to me, baby that I was, more penetrated by sound. The sounds that had once thrilled me with feeling now grated on my ear. I had been playing Bach’s third French Suite, Debussy’s “Engulfed Cathedral,” and Beethoven’s Pathétique before the hour the rapist spent playing with our lives, perhaps, so we thought, planning to kill us when he was finished with us. Where I once heard—in my mind’s ear—a cathedral rising from a Turner-like mist, I now heard scrapes and moans rising from the piano keys under my fingers when I played.

  I have trouble forcing my eye back to the page where I wrote the actions performed on me and by me during that very long hour.

  —tried to rape my sister Sara

  —I told him not to—please

  —stood up. Told me to stand. Picked me up. Entered me telling me to wrap my legs around him.

  Was he just a broken boy, needing someone to wrap her legs around him? This thought nauseates me again. A broken boy, stabbing and piercing a broken girl, leaving her shattered, as he was shattered. Why did I perceive him as broken even then, before I knew anything about him, before I knew anything about violence?

  —faces down on bed

  —told us it would make us angry

  I remember what happened next: the click of his gun. I thought he was cocking it, preparing to kill. I was calm again, entranced into complying with his murderous plans.

  Here is what shames me to the core: I thought he was going to kill me, but I did not fight him. I was hypnotized into passivity. I had no strength to run, and anyway I did not like the idea of being shot from behind. It seemed easier just to wait until the murder was done with.

  There was no sex in that room. No love. But there was a seduction. The seduction of death.

  Would he kill just one of us, making the other angry? Would he kill both of us, imagining that we would be angry at him in heaven, after our deaths? Why didn’t I get up? Why remain “facedown on bed”? Why did I not rise up, Medusa-like, eyes flashing, the snakes in my hair ready to strike him dead? Why did I not overpower the puny little man, smack that gun out of his paltry, worm-white fingers? I was strong then, probably stronger than he, certainly very strong now.

  And then he explained to us that the gun was not real, it was a cap gun.

  —it was a cap gun.

  I wrote dutifully, always dutiful. After complying with the rapist I complied with the police. Was this the most embarrassing part—that I had been entranced by the thought of a gun? That my fear, unfelt even as it was, had hypnotized me into complying with a person, if he was indeed a person and not an apparition, wielding a child’s toy, not an instrument of death?

  —he said don’t call police. I promised I wouldn’t.

  —it would make us in more trouble.

  —he left. We heard car.

  I remember this part, too. I told Sara he was right; we shouldn’t call the police. Somehow, even then, I felt him as a victim. I told her that they would put him in prison, that prison would not reform him: it would make him worse.

  After he left, I saw in my mind’s eye the image of a broken man, more broken still by the violence he would encounter behind bars, emerging as a true monster, a rapist who would actually kill his victims ra
ther than leave them only half dead. It may be, I know now, that this intuition was correct. Was this a kind of Stockholm syndrome? Does it happen that fast, in the space of an hour?

  Sara was more afraid than I, but also more alive. She retained a human-like strength in her arms and hands and mind that I now lacked. She insisted. She picked up the phone. No dial tone. He had cut the wires. He had cut the wires in the basement, a big puzzle. How would a rapist have time to cut the phone wires or know where to find them in the dark, dank basement? How long had he been in the house? How long had he been plotting this crime?

  “He kept saying he wouldn’t hurt us. He kept saying to listen, to be quiet.”

  I was quiet. I listened.

  I’m still listening now. I hear a rush, in my mind’s inner ear, of insistence. A kind of aural premonition, but a kind of premonition that goes both backward and forward, the soundless protest of all the raped, shamed, and silenced women from the beginning to the end of time. “He hurt you, he altered you forever,” the chorus soundlessly insists, grating on my inner ear—the ear that wishes not to be reminded of feeling. I respond to that chorus: Hurt is not the right word for what that man—if he was a man and not an apparition—did to me. I feel a void. Something got cut out of me in that hour—my capacity for pain and fear were removed. The operation to remove those organs is indeed painful, as you might guess. But the surgeon cauterizes the cut, and feeling is dulled, even at the points where the surgeon’s knife entered the once-tender flesh. There is no more tender flesh. It’s quite liberating to have feeling removed, the fear and pain of life now dulled.

  Nabokov once said, “Life is pain.” Buddhists, too, believe that to live is to crave and to crave is to feel pain. To live in this world involves pain. Had I not been catapulted, in that one hour, halfway to death, and therefore closer to enlightenment? In death we no longer feel human cravings, no longer feel human pain. I was now halfway there.

  Later, of course, I would come to reject this understanding of what happened to me that day. Yes, I was partly released from the pain of being alive. But my spirit had traveled, not toward the infinite divinity of enlightenment, but toward the infinite nothingness of indifference. A soft blanket of numbness descended like snow from the heavens, obscuring and protecting me from terror. Instead of fear, I felt numb. Instead of sadness, I experienced a complete absence of hope. I would come to feel, in a very small way, the indifference of the Muselmänner, the Auschwitz slang for the prisoners who had lost all hope, who no longer fought to stay alive. A divine spark, the craving for life, had been extinguished in those prisoners, who were destined for death. Their hopelessness turned out to be a death sentence. The other prisoners knew, by the blankness in the eyes of the Muselmänner, that these prisoners—whom Primo Levi referred to as “the drowned”—would soon die. The still-living prisoners avoided “the drowned” like the plague, as if indifference were contagious.

  They were right, of course. Indifference is a dangerous disease.

  “He kept saying to listen, to be quiet.”

  I have listened and I have been quiet all my life.

  But now I will speak.

  At the very bottom of the page, in a penmanship slanting ever more backward, I finally focused on what the police really wanted to know, the appearance of the apparition that had visited itself upon me.

  —he smelled

  —brown wool over face

  —shorts, white socks

  And then more detail.

  —bobby socks, sneakers

  —he was skinny

  —light brown hair on legs

  —strong cologne

  —concord accent

  It must have been hard to report the evidence of my senses—it came last, as if it were too painful to record anything other than the facts that transpired.

  In the margin at the end of my statement, the police officer wrote what must have been my words to him at the time: “Forcing myself, determined to get it out.”

  My sister’s statement reported the same facts, but her style is quite different from mine. She wrote in whole sentences, rather than lists. She began with how the rapist looked—his height, his socks, his sneakers. She remembered some things that I seem to have forgotten. That he made us lie down on the rug in the living room. That he had the woolen mask in his hand when he arrived. That we did not believe him at first when he said that he had a gun. She observed that he acted, throughout, as if he were teaching us.

  After the rape, I fell into a perilous numbness, but fortunately, my sister took charge. Sara was petrified, but also determined to get help. She had the thought of walking out of the house into the cool night and going to use a pay phone on the street. So we did. That phone, too, was broken. We seemed to have entered a new, separate world where there was no way to communicate with the people we once knew.

  Once again, Sara came up with a plan. We went to Friendly’s. There, finally, we found a phone that worked. We called the babysitter who was in charge of us while our father was away in Norway.

  Yes, we had been visiting our first stepmother, Lisa, our father’s ex-wife. We visited Lisa, and our half sisters, every Monday night after ballet. But on that particular Monday night, October 1, 1973, she went out to dinner with our half sisters, leaving us behind to do our homework in an unlocked house in a safe neighborhood in a safe town, a town filled with good girls, though we were especially good. I was a good girl—I always did my homework, even when I was bad.

  chapter two

  The Legacy of the Holocaust

  The phone at Friendly’s worked.

  I still recall, or imagine I recall, the familiar, metallic scent of the coin; the silver coin sweating, or damp from someone’s else’s sweat sticking it to my palm; then the comforting click as the coin slipped into its familiar slot; the familiar sounds of the line connecting. Some things seemed right and real. The sheen of the dime. The phone. The waitresses’ white aprons, taut across their bellies, their bubble-gum-pink dresses with short sleeves. Simple objects unfettered with emotions, objects I could see up close, were not entirely distorted. But I was aware, as if in my peripheral vision, that much of my world was now blurred, as if I were underwater or looking through the hazy shimmer of fluorescent lights in the dark night air. The shimmer had a sinister edge. Straight lines curved into asymptotes, but soft things seemed hard or dull. Friendly’s felt unfriendly to me now, like the fluorescent-lit café of Hopper’s Nighthawks. The waitresses—whom I had always thought of as tough but kind—now struck me as stupid and unaware. Their movements slowed to a crawl in my vision. They were unaware of the real world I had seen—a real world where gun-toting rapists could come into your safe suburban town and change your life forever.

  The babysitter, who was staying with us in my father’s absence mainly to ferry us around, was a high school teacher from a neighboring town. In that town, too, child rapists were beyond imagination. She, too, had been transformed by my experiences of the last hours into a person too slow and stupid to warrant notice. Nonetheless, when she saw our faces and our disheveled appearance, she finally believed us. She called our family doctor, who arranged for us to be examined at the local hospital.

  My father learned that we had been raped when our family doctor called him in Europe. A long-distance call. I remember thinking that the call must have been expensive. But my father didn’t come home to us right away. I have long known this, but I forget it, again and again. I have not been able to take in this information long enough to retain it in my memory, until now.

  The doctors prescribed sleeping pills. But I didn’t sleep. I lived in a haze, both night and day, until eventually the world slid back, more or less, into place. I no longer know what the world looked like before I was raped, but I know that afterward—for a week or so—I descended into a state of dizzying calm.

  We stayed, until my father came home, with Lisa, our first stepmother, in the house where we had been raped. I remember that Lisa comforted us
, that she took us in like baby birds that had fallen from the nest. I remember sensing that she was on our side. Other than her kindness, I remember little else from that period. I know that my father didn’t come home to us right away, not because I remember the days that followed our rape, but because it says so in the police report I now have before me, and because my sister remembers. I can access very little from my memory of what transpired in the days after the rape. I don’t remember trying to call our father on the phone. I imagine we would have thought such a call far too expensive to consider.

  My father married Lisa when I was five years old, very soon after our mother died. She was only twenty, just out of college, still a child herself. Lisa’s mother, Myra, was a wicked witch out of a fairy tale, not at all the sort of grandmother you would expect to encounter in real life. Myra pushed Lisa, her eldest daughter, down the stairs. She threatened Lisa’s younger sister, Judy, who was my age and my very best friend at the time, with a kitchen knife. She would occasionally leave Judy, who was red-haired and “obstinate,” on the median strip of a highway. Even now, writing these words, I want to gather up that redhead into my arms and keep her safe.