Al Tripodi said, "You don't really feel that way, do you?"
He was looking right at me. I thought of my father. Suddenly, there was no one else in the room.
"Like what?"
"You don't want to shoot him in the knees and that other stuff with the knives. You can't feel that way."
"Yes, I do," I said. "I want to kill him."
The room was still. Only Maria Flores, a quiet latino girl, had yet to speak. When Gallagher told her it was her turn, she passed. Gallagher pressed. Maria said she could not speak. Gallagher said she could formulate her thoughts during the break and then speak. "Everyone must comment," she said. "What Alice has given you is a gift. I think it's important that everyone recognize this and respond to her. You are joining her at the table by speaking."
We took a break. Al Tripodi quizzed me further out in the flagstone hall near the display case where faculty publications and awards sat on dusty glass shelves. I stared down at the dead bugs that had gotten stuck inside.
He could not understand how I could write those words.
"I hate him," I said.
"You're a beautiful girl."
Presented with this for the first time, I was unable to recognize something I would come up against time and time again. You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful. Like any girl, I wanted to be beautiful. But I was filled with hate. So how could I be both for Al Tripodi?
I told him about a dream I had over and over again those days. A daydream. Somehow, I wasn't sure how, I could get at the rapist and do anything to him that I wanted. I would do those things in my poem, I told Tripodi, and I would do worse.
"What is there to gain by that?" he asked me.
"Revenge," I said. "You don't understand."
"I guess I don't. I feel sorry for you."
I scrutinized the dead bugs on their backs, how their legs went out and then shot back in at sharp angles, how their antennae fell in stilled fragile arcs like lost human eyelashes. Tripodi could not see it because I didn't move a muscle, but my body was a wall of flames. I would not take pity, anybody's.
Maria Flores did not come back to class. I was infuriated. They just couldn't deal, I thought, and this made me angry. I knew I was not beautiful and in Gallagher's presence, for three hours that day, I didn't have to care about being beautiful. She, by writing that first line down, by workshopping the piece, had given me my permission slip-I could hate.
Exactly one week later, Gallagher's If they caught you would turn out to be all too prescient. On October 5, I ran into my rapist on the street. By the end of that night, I could stop calling him "the rapist," and start calling him Gregory Madison.
I had workshop that day with Tobias Wolff.
Wolff, whom I met the same day I did Gallagher, was a harder sell. He was a man, and at the time men had to surprise me before I even so much as thought about trusting them. He was not a performer. He made it clear that his personality was not the issue-fiction was. So I, who had decided to be a poet and had lucked into this fiction thing, took a wait-and-see attitude. I was the only sophomore in Wolff's class and the only one to wear weird clothes. The fiction writers wore a lot of starch and denim, shirts emblazoned with sports teams or upright plaids. Poets flowed. They did not, most certainly, wear shirts emblazoned with the logos of sports teams. I saw myself as a poet. Tobias Wolff, with his military posture and never indirect analysis of a story, was not my bag.
Before class I needed to get something to eat. I walked down to Marshall Street from Haven. I had been in Syracuse for a month and begun to make quick trips to Marshall Street, as everyone did, for snacks and school supplies. There was a mom-and-pop store that I liked. It was run by a Palestinian man in his sixties, who often told stories and who had an emphasis, when he said "Good day," that told me he meant it.
I was walking down the street when I saw, up ahead, a black man talking to a shady-looking white guy. The white guy stood in an alleyway and talked over the top of the fence. He had long brown hair, to his shoulders, and a few days' growth of beard. He wore a white T-shirt whose sleeves were rolled up to accentuate the small bellies of his biceps. The black guy I could see only from the back, but I was hyperaware. I went through my checklist: right height, right build, something in his posture, talking to a shady guy. Cross the street!
I did. I crossed the street and walked the rest of the way to the mom-and-pop store. I did not look back. I crossed the street again to walk directly into the store. Time slowed down here. I remember things in the way one rarely does. I knew I had to go back outside and I tried to calm myself. Inside the store I chose a peach yogurt and a Teem soda-two items, if you knew me, that testified to my faltering composure. When the Palestinian man rang them up, he was brusque and hurried. There was no "Good day."
I left the store, crossed directly back to the safety of the other side of the street, and shot a quick glance over to the alleyway. Both men were gone. I also noticed a policeman to my right, on my side of the street. He was getting out of his patrol car. He was very tall, over six feet, and had bright, carrot-orange hair and a mustache. He seemed in no hurry. I assessed my surroundings and decided I was okay. It had been just a more intense version of the fear I had felt around certain black men ever since the rape. I checked my watch and quickened my step. I did not want to be late for Wolff's workshop.
Then, as if out of nowhere, I saw my rapist crossing toward me. He walked diagonally across the street from the other side. I did not stop walking. Or scream.
He was smiling as he approached. He recognized me. It was a stroll in the park to him; he had met an acquaintance on the street.
I knew him but I could not make myself speak. I needed all my energy to focus on believing I was not under his control again.
"Hey, girl," he said. "Don't I know you from somewhere?" He smirked at me, remembering.
I did not respond. I looked directly at him. Knew his face had been the face over me in the tunnel. Knew I had kissed those lips, stared into those eyes, smelled the crushed-berry smell on his skin.
I was too afraid to yell out. There was a cop behind me but I could not scream: "That's the man who raped me!" That happens in movies. I put one foot in front of the other. I heard him laughing behind me. But I was still walking.
He had no fear. It had been nearly six months since we'd seen each other last. Six months since I lay under him in a tunnel on top of a bed of broken glass. He was laughing because he had gotten away with it, because he had raped before me, and because he would rape again. My devastation was a pleasure for him. He was walking the streets, scot-free.
I turned the corner at the end of the block. Over my shoulder I saw him walking up to the redheaded policeman. He was shooting the breeze, so sure of his safety that he felt comfortable enough, right after seeing me, to tease a cop.
I never question why I went to tell Wolff I couldn't attend his class. It was my duty. I was his student. I was the only sophomore in the class.
I walked to the Hall of Languages at the top of the hill and checked my watch. I had time before Wolff's class to make two phone calls from the phone booth on the bottom floor. I called Ken Childs, told him what had happened, asked him to meet me at the library nearby in half an hour. I wanted to make a sketch of the rapist and Ken was in art school. Then, as soon as I hung up the phone, I called my parents collect.
They both got on the phone.
"Mom and Dad," I said, "I'm calling from the Hall of Languages."
My mother was attuned now to any waver in my voice.