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  She drew the curtain and I stood there, letting the water beat over me.

  “Can you help me?” I asked.

  Tree pulled the curtain back a few inches.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I’m afraid I’ll fall down. Can you take the soap and help wash me?”

  She reached through the water and got the large square brick of soap. She drew it down my back, nothing but the bar of soap touching me. I felt the rapist’s words, “worst bitch,” as I would feel them almost constantly for years when I undressed in front of other people.

  “Forget it,” I said, unable to look at her. “I’ll do it myself. Just put the soap back.”

  She did, then pulled the curtain closed, before leaving.

  I sat down in the shower. I took a washcloth and lathered it up. I scrubbed hard with the rough towel, under a tap so hot my skin had already turned beet red. The last thing I did was put the towel over my face and with both hands rubbed it back and forth over and over again until the cuts and their blood turned the small white towel pink.

  After the hot shower, I dressed in clothes that Tree and Diane had hurriedly selected from the few clean clothes I had. They had forgotten any underwear so I had no bra or underpants. What I did have was a pair of old jeans that I had embroidered flowers on while still in high school and then, when the knees ripped open, had sewn intricate handmade patches on—long strips of pleated paisley and deep-green velvet. My grandmother had labeled them my “rebel” pants. On top, I wore a thin white-and-red-striped blouse. I left the shirttails out, hoping to hide as much as possible of the jeans.

  The heat of the shower and the Demerol worked together to make me groggy during the drive to the police station. I remember seeing the resident advisor, a sophomore named Cindy, outside the security door on the third floor of the police station, called the Public Safety Building. I wasn’t prepared to see anyone with such a bright face, such an all-American-coed presence.

  Mary Alice stayed outside with Cindy as police officers led me through a security door. I met a plainclothes detective inside. He was short, with longish black hair. He reminded me of Starsky from Starsky and Hutch, and seemed different from the other policemen. He was nice to me but his shift was ending. He assigned me to Sergeant Lorenz, who had not yet arrived at the station.

  In hindsight I can only imagine how I appeared to them. My face was swollen, my hair wet, my clothes—the “rebel” pants especially and the lack of a bra—and on top of this, the Demerol.

  I made a composite from microfilm features. I worked with an officer and was frustrated because none of my rapist’s features seemed to be among the fifty or so noses, eyes, and lips. I gave exact descriptions but when nothing was acceptable to me among the tiny black-and-white features I could select, the policeman decided on what was best. The composite that went out that night looked little like him.

  The police then took a series of pictures of me, never knowing another series had been taken earlier that night. Ken Childs, a boy I liked, had shot almost a whole roll of film, snapping candids of me in various poses throughout his apartment.

  Ken had a crush on me, and I knew that he was taking the pictures to show to people at home over the summer. I knew the photos would be judged. Was I pretty? Did I look smart? Would his friends be reduced to “She seems nice”? Or, worse still, “That’s a nice sweater she’s wearing”?

  I had gained weight, but the jeans I wore were still too big for me, and I’d borrowed my mother’s white oxford-cloth shirt and a tan cable cardigan sweater. The word that comes to mind here is frumpy.

  So, in the “before” photos taken by Ken Childs, I am at first posing, then giggling, then laughing openly. For all my self-consciousness, I also got lost in the giggling silliness of our crush. I balance a box of raisins on my head, I stare at the writing on the back as if it were a gripping text, I prop my feet up on the edge of his dining table. I smile, smile, smile.

  In the “after” photos the police took, I stand shocked. The word shock, in this context, is meant to mean I was no longer there. If you have seen police photos of crime victims, you will know that they appear either bleached or unusually dark. Mine were of the overexposed variety. There were four types of poses. Face. Face and neck. Neck. Standing with identity number. No one tells you at the time how important these photos will be. The cosmetics of rape are central to proving any case. So far, in appearance, I was two for two: I wore loose, unenticing clothes; I had clearly been beaten. Add this to my virginity, and you will begin to understand much of what matters inside the courtroom.

  Finally, I was allowed to leave the Public Safety Building with Cindy, Mary Alice, and Tree. I told the officers in the station that I would return in a few hours and could be counted on to give an affidavit and look through mug shots. I wanted them to see I was serious, I wouldn’t let them down. But they were working the night shift. Even when I did come back—and in their minds, it was far from certain that I would—they wouldn’t be there to see I’d kept my word.

  The police drove us back to Marion Dorm. It was early in the morning. Light had begun to creep up over Thorden Park at the top of the hill. I had to tell my mother.

  The dorm was deathly quiet. Cindy went into her room at the top of the hall and Mary Alice and I agreed we would meet her there momentarily. Neither of us had a private phone.

  We went to my room, where I found a bra and underwear to put on under my clothes.

  Back out in the hallway, we ran into Diane and her boyfriend, Victor. They had been up all night, waiting for me to come home.

  My relationship to Victor, before that morning, consisted primarily of not understanding what he had in common with Diane, whom I found loud. He was handsome and athletic and very, very quiet around all of us. He had entered school already having chosen his major. It was something like electrical engineering. Very different from poetry. Victor was black.

  “Alice,” Diane said.

  Other people came out of Cindy’s open doorway. Girls I knew vaguely or those I didn’t know.

  “Victor wants to hug you,” Diane said.

  I looked at Victor. This was too much. He was not my rapist, I knew that. That was not the issue. But he was blocking my way to the last thing on earth I wanted to do and the thing I knew I had to do. Make that call to my mother.

  “I don’t think I can,” I said to Victor.

  “He was black, wasn’t he?” Victor asked. He was trying to get me to look at him, look right at him.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He was crying. The tears ran slowly down the outside of his cheeks. “I’m so sorry.”

  I don’t know whether I hugged him because I could not stand to see him crying (so odd in the Victor I knew, the quiet Victor who studied diligently or smiled shyly at Diane), or because I was prompted further by those around us. He held me until I had to pull away and then he let me go. He was miserable, and I cannot even now imagine what was going on inside his head. Perhaps he already knew that both relatives and strangers would say things to me like “I bet he was black,” and so he wanted to give me something to counter this, some experience in the same twenty-four hours that would make me resist placing people in categories and aiming at them my full-on hate. It was my first hug from a man after the rape—black or white—and all I knew was that I couldn’t give anything back. The arms around me, the vague threat of physical power, were all too much.

  By the end, Victor and I had an audience. It was something I would have to get used to. Standing close to him, but separated from the embrace, I was aware of Mary Alice and of Diane. They belonged. The others were foggy and off to the side. They were watching my life as if it were a movie. In their version of the story, where did they fit? I would find out over the years that in a few versions, I was their best friend. Knowing a victim is like knowing a celebrity. Particularly when the crime is clouded in taboo. When I was doing research for this book, back in Syracuse, I met a wo
man like this. Without recognizing me at first, only knowing I was writing a book on Alice Sebold’s rape case, she hurried in from another room and told me and those assisting me that “the victim in that case was my best friend.” I had no idea who she was. When someone referred to me by name, she blinked and then came forward, embracing me to save face.

  In Cindy’s room, I sat down on the bed closest to the door. Cindy, Mary Alice, and Tree were there, perhaps Diane. Cindy had shooed the others out and shut her door.

  It was time. I sat with the phone in my lap. My mother was only a few miles away, having driven up the day before to take me home from Syracuse. She would be up and puttering around her hotel room at the Holiday Inn. At that time she traveled with her own coffeemaker because she made decaf in her room. She was coming down from as much as ten cups of coffee a day, and restaurants weren’t yet in the custom of serving decaf.

  Before she had dropped me off at Ken Childs’s house the evening before, we had agreed she would come to the dorm around 8:30 A.M.—a late start for her but a concession to the fact that I would have been up late saying good-bye to friends. I looked around at my girlfriends, hoping they would say, “You don’t look so bad,” or provide me with the single and perfect story to explain the cuts and bruises on my face—the story that I hadn’t been able to come up with during the night.

  Tree dialed the phone.

  When my mother picked up, Tree said, “Mrs. Sebold, this is a friend of Alice’s, Tree Roebeck.”

  Maybe my mother said hello.

  “I’m going to put Alice on the phone now. She needs to speak with you.”

  Tree handed me the phone.

  “Mom,” I started.

  She must not have heard what I thought was the obvious quaver in my voice. She was irritated.

  “What is it, Alice? You know I’m due over soon; can’t it wait?”

  “Mom, I need to tell you something.”

  She heard it now. “What, what is it?”

  I said it as if I were reading a line from a script.

  “Last night I was beaten and raped in the park.”

  My mother said, “Oh, my God,” and then, after a quick inhalation of breath, a startled gasp, she reeled herself in. “Are you all right?”

  “Can you come get me, Mommy?” I asked.

  She said it would be twenty minutes or so, she had to pack up and check out, but she would be there.

  I hung up the phone.

  Mary Alice suggested that we wait in her room until my mother arrived. Someone had bought bagels or doughnuts.

  In the time since our arrival back at the dorm, students had woken up. There was hurry all around me. Many students, including my friends, were meeting parents for breakfast or rushing to bus stations and airports. People would attend to me and then switch off to finish packing. I sat with my back against the cinderblock dorm wall. As people came in and out and the door opened, I could hear bits of conversation.

  “Where is she?” “Raped …” “… see her face?” “… she know him?” “… always weird …”

  I had not eaten anything since the night before—since the raisins at Ken Childs’s house—and I could not look at the bagels or doughnuts without feeling what—the rapist’s penis—had last been in my mouth. I tried to stay awake. I had been up for more than twenty-four hours—far longer, what with the all-nighters that I’d pulled during finals week—but I was afraid to fall asleep before my mother got there. My girlfriends and the resident advisor, who, after all, was only nineteen, tried to take care of me, but I had begun to notice that I was now on the other side of something they could not understand. I didn’t understand it myself.

  TWO

  While I waited for my mother, people began to leave. I ate a cracker, offered by Tree or Mary Alice. Friends were saying good-bye. Mary Alice wasn’t leaving until later in the day. She had done instinctively what few people do in the face of a crisis: She had signed on for the whole ride.

  I felt I needed to dress up for my mother and for the ride home. Mary Alice had already been shocked when, at Christmas and spring break, I had insisted on putting on a skirt and suit jacket to take the bus home to Pennsylvania. Both times, Mary Alice waited on the curb outside the dorm in sweatpants and a lumpy down jacket, trash bags of laundry lined up and ready to be loaded by her parents into their car. But my parents liked to see me look nice, debated my choice of clothing many mornings during high school. I had begun dieting at eleven and my weight, and how it marred my beauty, was a major topic of conversation. My father was the king of the backhanded compliment. “You look just like a Russian ballerina,” he said once, “only too fat.” My mother repeatedly said, “If you weren’t so beautiful in the first place, it wouldn’t matter.” The implication being, I guess, that I was supposed to know they thought I was beautiful. The result, of course, was that I only thought I was ugly.

  There was probably no better way to confirm this for me than to be raped. In high school, two boys had, in the Senior Class Will, left me toothpicks and pigment. The toothpicks were for my Asian-looking eyes, the pigment for my white skin. I was pale, always pale, and unmuscled. My lips were big and my eyes small. The morning of the rape my lips were cut, my eyes were swollen.

  I put on a green and red kilt and made sure to use the kilt pin that my mother had searched stores for after we purchased the skirt. The indecency of any wrap skirt was something she underlined to me often, particularly when we saw a woman or girl who was unaware that the flap had blown open and we, her audience in parking lot or shopping mall, could see more leg than, as my mother said, “anyone would want to.”

  My mother believed in buying clothes big, so, as I grew up, I listened to my older sister, Mary, complain about how all the clothes Mom bought us were huge. In the dressing rooms of department stores, my mother would test the size of all pants or skirts by putting her hand in the waistband. If she couldn’t easily slide her hand between our underwear and whatever outfit we were trying on, then it was too tight. If my sister complained, my mother would say, “Mary, I don’t know why you insist on wanting pants that are so tight they leave nothing, and I mean nothing, to the imagination.”

  We sat with our legs crossed. Our hair was neat and pulled back over the ears. We were not allowed to wear jeans more than once a week until we reached high school. We had to wear a dress to school at least once a week. No heels except pumps from Pappagallo, which were primarily for church and, even then, the heels did not exceed 1.5 inches. I was told whores and waitresses chewed gum and only tiny women could wear turtlenecks and ankle straps.

  I knew, now that I had been raped, I should try to look good for my parents. Having gained the regulation freshman fifteen meant that my skirt that day fit. I was trying to prove to them and to myself that I was still who I had always been. I was beautiful, if fat. I was smart, if loud. I was good, if ruined.

  While I dressed, Tricia, a representative from the Rape Crisis Center, arrived. She passed out pamphlets to my friends and left stacks of them in the front hall of the dorm. If anyone had wondered what all the commotion the night before had been about, now they knew for sure. Tricia was tall and thin with light brown hair that fell about her head in thin and wispy waves. Her approach, a sort of comforting “I’m here for you” stance, was not one I trusted. I had Mary Alice. My mother was coming. I did not appreciate the soft touch of this stranger and I did not want to belong to her club.

  I got a two-minute warning that my mother was coming up the stairs. I wanted Tricia to shut up—didn’t see how what she was saying could help me with this encounter—and I paced the room, wondering if I should go out and greet my mother in the hall.

  “Open the door,” I said to Mary Alice. I breathed deeply and stood in the middle of the room. I wanted my mother to know I was all right. Nothing could get to me. I’d been raped but I was fine.

  Within seconds, I saw that my mother, who I had expected would collapse, had the kind of fresh energy that was needed to
get me through the rest of that day.

  “I’m here now,” she said. Both of our chins wobbled when we were on the verge of tears, a trait we shared and hated.

  I told her about the police, that we had to go back. They needed a formal affidavit and there were mug books to look at. My mother spoke to Tricia and to Cindy, thanked Tree and Diane, and especially Mary Alice, whom she had met previously. I watched as she took over. I let her do it, willingly, for now not questioning its toll on her.

  The girls helped my mother pack and bring my things out to the car. Victor helped too. I stayed in the room. The hallway had become a difficult place for me. Doorways there led into rooms where people knew about me.

  Before my mother and I took our leave, and as a final way to show her love, Mary Alice worked among the tangles in my hair to make a French braid. It was something she knew how to do that I didn’t. Something she had tons of practice with, from having groomed horses whose manes she braided for competition. It hurt while she did it, my scalp was very sore from the rapist yanking and pulling me by my hair, but with each hank of hair she braided in, I tried to gather what energy I had left. I knew before Mary Alice and my mother walked me downstairs and to the car, where Mary Alice hugged me and said good-bye, that I was going to pretend, as best as I could, that I was fine.

  We drove downtown to the Public Safety Building. There was this one chore before we could go home.

  I looked at mug shots, but I didn’t see the man who raped me. At 9:00 A.M. Sergeant Lorenz arrived and the first order of business was to take my affidavit. My body was shutting down now and I was having trouble staying awake. Lorenz led me to the interrogation room, the walls of which were covered with thick carpet. While I told my story, he sat at a desk behind an upright typewriter, typing slowly in a hunt-and-peck style. I was drifting, trying hard to remain alert, but I told him everything. It was Lorenz’s job to pare it down to one page for the file and to this effect he would at times bark angrily, “That’s inconsequential, just the facts.” I took each reprimand for what it was: an awareness that the specificity of my rape did not matter, but only how and if it conformed to an established charge. Rape 1, Sodomy 1, etc. How he twisted my breasts or shoved his fist up inside me, my virginity: inconsequential.