"You can't do anything," I said to him.
I wish I could go back and erase my last line to Tom. I wish I could say, "You're already doing it, Tom. You're listening." I wondered how his mother had gone on to have a husband and a family and never tell anyone.
After those visits in the early summer, Tom and I saw each other at church. By that time I was no longer fixated on gaining Tom's attention or being seen with a handsome boy. I was scrutinizing his mother. She knew I knew about her, and she certainly knew about me, but we never spoke. A distance grew between me and Tom. It would have anyway, but the story of my rape had stormed into their lives uninvited. It had catalyzed a revelation inside their home. How that revelation eventually affected them I do not know. But via her son, Mrs. McAllister gave me two things: my first awareness of another rape victim who lived in my world, and, by telling her sons, the proof that there was power to be had in sharing my story.
The urge to tell was immediate. It sprang out of a response so ingrained in me that even if I had tried to hold it back, thought better of it, I doubt I could have done so.
My family had secrets, and from an early age, I had crowned myself the one who would reveal them. I hated the hush-hush of hiding things from other people. The constant instruction to "keep it down or the neighbors will hear you." My usual response to this was "So what?"
Recently my mother and I had a discussion about saving face at her nearby Radio Shack.
"I'm convinced the clerk thinks I'm a lunatic," my mother said, on the subject of returning a portable phone.
"People return things all the time, Mom," I said.
"I've already returned it once."
"So, the clerk may think you're a pain in the ass but I doubt he'll think you're insane."
"I just can't go in there again. I can hear them now: 'Oh, there's that old lady who couldn't figure out a fork if it came with instructions.' "
"Mom," I said, "they exchange things all the time."
It's funny now, but growing up, the worry over the opinions of others meant keeping secrets. My grandmother, my mother's mother, had had a brother who died drunk. His body was discovered three weeks later by his younger brother. My sister and I were warned never to tell Grandma that Mom was an alcoholic. We also weren't supposed to talk about her flaps, and she did her best to hide them on our visits to Bethesda, where her parents lived. Although my parents cursed a blue streak, we were not supposed to curse. And even though we heard what they thought of the deacon at St. Peter's (a "supercilious moron"), what they thought of the neighbors ("He's courting a heart attack with all that fat"), what they thought of one sister when the other sister was up in her room-we were not meant to repeat it.
I seemed constitutionally unable to follow these instructions. When we moved to Pennsylvania from Rockville, Maryland, when I was five, my sister had to repeat the third grade. This was because she was too young, according to the East Whiteland school district, to be in fourth grade. So, on this basis alone, she had to stay in third grade for another year. This was traumatic for her because flunking a grade was one of the worst brands you could bear at age eight in a new town. My mother said no one had to know. She failed to say that for this to happen, they would have to wire my mouth shut and keep me from leaving the house.
A few days after settling into the new house, I was in the backyard with our basset hound, Feijoo. I met a neighbor, Mrs. Cochran, who bent down and introduced herself. She had a child my age, a boy Brian, and no doubt wanted to get the scoop on our family. I obliged her.
"My mother's the one with the pits in her face," I said to our shocked neighbor. I was referring to my mother's acne scars. In response to the question, "Are there any more like you at home?" I said, "No, but there's my sister. She just flunked third grade."
And so it went. My mouth only got bigger as time wore on, but I won't take all the blame. I was acutely aware of my audience; the adults loved it.
Simply, the rules of revelation were too complicated for me to understand. My parents could say anything they wanted, but once outside our house, I was supposed to keep mum.
"The neighbors like to pump you for information," my mother would say. "You have to learn to be more reticent. I don't know why you insist on talking to everyone."
I didn't know what reticent meant. I was only following their example. If they wanted a quiet kid, I eventually told them during some screaming match in high school, maybe I should have taken up smoking. That way I would have lung cancer instead of what my mother accused me of having, which was cancer of the mouth.
Sergeant Lorenz was the first person to hear my story. But he often interrupted with the words, "That's inconsequential." He probed my story for facts that would dovetail into the more salient charges. He was what he was: a "just-the-facts-ma'am" cop.
Who could I tell these things to? I was at home. I didn't feel my sister could handle it and Mary Alice was miles away, working a job at the Jersey shore. It was not something I felt I could do over the phone lines. I tried to tell my mother.
I was privy to many things. Little asides from my mother, such as, "Your father doesn't know the meaning of affection," when I was eleven, or the discussions we had had during my grandfather's protracted illness and death. No events were hidden from me. That was a decision I think my mother made early, in direct response to her own mother. My grandmother is stoic and taciturn. In a crisis, her words of wisdom are old schooclass="underline" "If you don't think about it, it will go away." My mother, given her own life, knew this not to be true.
So there was a precedent for our discussion. By the time I was eighteen, she had sat me down and detailed her alcoholism, its onset and aftermath. She believed that by sharing such things I might be able to avoid them or, if need be, recognize them when they occurred. By talking about them to her children, she was also acknowledging that they were real and that they had an effect on us too, that things like this shaped a family, not just the person they happened to.
My memory says it may have been nighttime, I can't be certain, but it was a few weeks after the rape and it was at the kitchen table. If my mother and I were not alone in the house, then certainly my father was in his study and my sister in her room, so we could have heard approaching footsteps if there were any.
"I need to tell you what happened in the tunnel," I said.
Place mats were still on the table from dinner. My mother fidgeted with the corner of hers.
"You can try," she said, "but I can't promise I can do this."
I began. I told her about Ken Childs's house, about taking pictures in his apartment. I got onto the path in the park. I told her about the rapist's hands, how he grabbed me with both arms, about the fighting on the bricks. When I got into the tunnel, started taking off my clothes, when he touched me, she had to stop.
"I can't, Alice," she said. "I want to, but I can't."
"It helps me to try and talk about it, Mom," I said.
"I understand that, but I don't think I'm the one to do it with."
"I don't have anyone else," I said.
"I can make you an appointment with Dr. Graham."
Dr. Graham was my mother's psychiatrist. In reality, she was' the family psychiatrist. She had begun as my sister's psychiatrist, and then wanted to see us as a family so she could see how the family dynamic affected my sister. My mother had even sent me to Dr. Graham a few times after a particularly bad spill down the spiral staircase. I was always running up or down it in sock feet and often would slip on the polished wood. Each time, I did a sort of bouncing pratfall until I reached the landing or my limbs tangled into a configuration that stopped my body just short of the flagstone floor in the front hall. My mother decided this clumsiness might be part of a desire to self-destruct. I was certain it was nothing so sophisticated. I was a klutz.