"I'm sorry," she said. "You're doing so well with it. I just don't know how to act."
When I moved toward her she moved away.
"Mary," I said. "I feel like shit."
"I don't know how you're being so strong." She looked at me, tears on her cheeks.
"It's okay," I said to my sister. "It's all going to be okay."
Still, she would not let me touch her. She flittered nervously from the shower curtain to the towel rack, like a bird trapped in a cage. I told her I'd be downstairs stuffing my face and that she should join me, and then I closed the door and left.
My sister had always been frailer than I was. At a YMCA day camp when we were kids, they'd passed out badges on the last day. So that every child got one, the counselors made up categories. I got an arts and crafts badge symbolized by a palette and brushes. My sister got the badge for being the quietest camper. On her badge, which they made by hand, they had glued a gray felt mouse. My sister took it on as her symbol, eventually incorporating a small mouse into the tail of the y in her signature.
Back downstairs, my mother and father asked after her. I told them she would be down soon.
"Well, Alice," my father said, "if it had to happen to one of you, I'm glad it was you and not your sister."
"Christ, Bud," my mother said.
"I only meant that of the two of them-"
"I know what you meant, Dad," I said, and touched my hand to his forearm.
"See, Jane," he said.
My mother felt that family, or the idea of it, should be uppermost in everyone's mind during those first few weeks. This was a hard sell to four solitary souls, but that summer I watched more bad television in the company of my family than I have ever seen before or since.
Dinnertime became sacred. My mother, whose kitchen is decorated with pithy signs that, loosely translated, all say, in one form or another, "The Cook Is Out," made supper every night. I remember my sister attempted to restrain herself from accusing my dad of "smacking." We were all on our best behavior. I cannot imagine what was going on in their minds. How tired they all probably were. Did they buy my strong-woman act, or just pretend to?
In those first weeks I wore nothing but nightgowns. Lanz nightgowns. Specially bought by my mother and father. My mother might suggest to my father, when he was going out to the grocery, that he stop by and get me a new nightgown. It was a way we could all feel rich, a rational splurge.
So while the rest of the family sat at the dinner table wearing the normal clothes of summer, I sat in my chair wearing a long white nightgown.
I can't remember how it first came up but, once it did, it took over the conversation.
The topic was the rapist's weapon. I may have been talking about how the police had found my glasses and the rapist's knife in the same area out by the brick path.
"You mean he didn't have the knife in the tunnel?" my father asked.
"No," I said.
"I don't think I understand."
"What's there to understand, Bud?" my mother asked. Perhaps, after twenty years of marriage, she knew where he was leading. Privately, she may already have defended me to him.
"How could you have been raped if he didn't have the knife?"
Our dinner table could be loud concerning any topic. A favorite point of contention was the preferred spelling or definition of a certain word. It was not uncommon for the Oxford English Dictionary to be dragged into the dining room, even on holidays or with guests present. The poodle-mix, Webster, had been named after the more portable mediator. But this time the argument consisted of a clear division between male and female-between two women, my mother and my sister, and my father.
I became aware that I would lose my father if he was ostracized. Though in my defense, my sister and mother shouted at him to be quiet, I told the two of them I wanted to handle it. I asked my father to come upstairs with me, where we could talk. My mother and sister were so angry at him they were red in the face. My father was like a little boy who, thinking that he understood the rules of the game, is frightened when the others tell him he is wrong.
We walked upstairs to my mother's bedroom. I sat him down on the couch and took up a position across from him on my mother's desk chair.
"I'm not going to attack you, Dad," I said. "I want you to tell me why you don't understand, and I'll try to explain it to you."
"I don't know why you didn't try to get away," he said.
"I did."
"But how could he have raped you unless you let him?"
"That would be like saying I wanted it to happen."
"But he didn't have the knife in the tunnel."
"Dad," I said, "think about this. Wouldn't it be physically impossible to rape and beat me while holding a knife the whole time?"
He thought for a second and then seemed to agree.
"So most women who are raped," I said, "even if there was a weapon, when the rape is going on, the weapon is not there in her face. He overpowered me, Dad. He beat me up. I couldn't want something like that, it's impossible."
When I look back on myself in that room I don't understand how I could have been so patient. All I can think is that his ignorance was inconceivable to me. I was shocked by it but I had a desperate need for him to understand. If he didn't-he who was my father and who clearly wanted to understand-what man would?
He did not comprehend what I had been through, or how it could have happened without some complicity on my part. His ignorance hurt. It still hurts, but I don't blame him. My father may not have fully understood, but what was most important to me was that I left the room knowing how much it had meant to him that I took him upstairs and tried, as best I could, to answer his questions. I loved him and he loved me and our communication was imperfect. That didn't seem so bad to me. After all, I had been prepared for the news of the rape to destroy everyone in my life. We were living, and, in those first weeks, that was enough.
Although TV was something I could share with my family while we each remained in our individual islands of pain, it was also problematic.
I'd always liked Kojak. He was bald and cynical and talked curtly out of the side of his mouth while sucking on a lollipop. But he had a big heart. He also policed a city and had a bumbling sibling he got to kick around. This made him attractive to me.
So I watched Kojak as I lay in my Lanz nightgown and drank chocolate milk shakes. (At first, I had difficulty with solid food. Initially my mouth was sore from the sodomy and, after this, having food in my mouth reminded me too much of the rapist's penis as it lay against my tongue.)
Watching Kojak alone was endurable, because even though violent, it was so obviously fictional in this violence (Where was the smell? The blood? Why did all the victims have perfect faces and bodies?). But when my sister or father or mother came in to watch television with me, I grew tense.
I have memories of my sister sitting in the rocker in front of where I was positioned on the couch. She would always ask me if a given program was all right before turning it on. She would be vigilant throughout the hour or two hours it was on. If she worried, I would see her head start to turn around to check on me.
"I'm okay, Mary," I began saying, able to predict when she might grow concerned.
It made me angry with her and with my parents. I needed the pretense that inside the house I was still the same person I'd always been. It was ridiculous but essential, and I felt the stares of my family as betrayals, even though intellectually I knew otherwise.
What took me a bit longer to put together was that those television shows were more upsetting to them than they could ever have been to me. They had no idea, because I had not told them, what had happened to me in that tunnel-what the particulars were. They were fitting together the horrors of imagination and nightmare and trying to fashion what had been their sister's or child's reality. I knew exactly what had happened. But can you speak those sentences to the people you love? Tell them you were urinated on or that you kissed back because you did not want to die?