ELEVEN
In late April, a month after Easter break, I was on Marshall Street. It was midafternoon. Spring had finally come to Upstate New York in that peekaboo way that it does. There was still old snow on the ground. Each winter, the snow made Syracuse beautiful; it covered the gritty, Northeastern browns and grays of the buildings and roads. But by April, everyone had had enough of it, and the warmth was celebrated by the students. They wore shorts, despite the fact that goose bumps rose up and down their arms and legs, and the girls showed off their Florida tans. The street was crowded, and with the anticipation of the end of classes that meant the start of good times, students were smiling and laughing and buying SU paraphernalia in the stores on Marshall Street.
I had gone shopping for my sister. She was graduating magna cum laude from Penn. As I walked up Marshall, a group of fraternity boys and their girlfriends were coming my way. They were all bright spring smiles. Two of the boys flaunted their toughness by wearing white starched boxer shorts with the standard no-sock Docksiders on their feet. I looked at them because I had to; they were covering the sidewalk and begging for attention. But there was someone trying to get by them on the other side.
I grew up watching Bewitched, in which the Elizabeth Montgomery character was able to snap her fingers and freeze everyone but herself and her husband, Darrin. They continued talking while the frozen people stayed still in their awkward, formerly animated poses. That was how it felt that day. I saw Gregory Madison blocked by this crowd, and then, he saw me. Everything else stopped.
I don't know why I hadn't thought that this could happen. But I hadn't. I still envisioned him in jail, or, at least, not stupid enough to come back to the university area before the trial. But there he was. In October he had been cocksure when he spotted me. Now we saw each other, recognized each other, and nodded. No words. It was a split second. The happy frat boys and girls stood between us. We passed by them on either side. His eyes told me what I needed to know. I had become his opponent now, no longer merely his victim. This he recognized.
Lila and I had begun, sometime that winter, to call each other Clone. We both gained from it. By being my clone, she could seem a bit more daring and wild than she really was; I could pretend that I was a normal college coed whose life revolved as much around my classes and food runs to Marshall Street as it did a rape trial. As Clones we decided to room together off campus. The two of us, and a friend of Lila's named Sue, found a three-bedroom apartment in an off-campus area where many students lived. We were excited about living in a real house, and, certain the trial would have to be over by then, I saw this as a fresh start. We would take possession in the fall.
By the first week of May, I was packing to go home for the summer. I'd gotten a B in my Shakespeare class and said good-bye to Jamie. I had no illusions that I would hear from him.
I had taken a course called Cervantes in English in which, for the final paper, I took my revenge on the myth of La Mancha. I reinterpreted Don Quixote as a modern urban parable and made Sancho the hero. He was street smart where Quixote was not. In my version, Quixote drowns in a curbside puddle, unable to realize it is not a lake.
Before I left, I called Gail to let her know my schedule. All spring, the office of the district attorney had given me an "any minute now" rap and this time was no different. She thanked me and asked me about my plans.
"I'll get a summer job, I guess," I said.
"I'm hoping we'll go to trial soon," she said. "You will be available, won't you?"
"It's my number-one priority," I said, not putting it together until years later: In rape cases, it was almost expected that the victim would drop out of the process even if she originally initiated it.
"Alice, let me ask you something," she said, her tone shifting a bit.
"Yes?"
"Will you have someone with you from home?"
"I don't know," I said.
I had talked to my parents about this during the Christmas holidays and then again at Easter. My mother had spoken to her psychiatrist, Dr. Graham, about it, and my father fretted that the longer the trial was postponed, the greater the chance it would ruin his annual trip to Europe.
Until recently I believed that their final decision, that he would be the one who came with me, was based on her own inability to be there-the unpredictable chances of a flap. But as it turned out, Dr. Graham had counseled her to go despite her panic.
In the phone call in which my mother told me how the decision had ultimately been made, I stayed quiet. I asked the questions a reporter would ask. Numbly, I gathered the information. My mother was peeved at Graham, she said, because, of course, Graham would "support the professional, i.e., your father."
"So Dad didn't want to come with me either?" I asked, playing out what she'd begun.
"Of course not, his precious Spain awaited."
What I came away with was the fact that neither one of them had wanted to be at the trial with me. They had their reasons; I acknowledge these.
Finally, it was decided, my father would come with me. I held out a small corner of hope, up until the moment my father and I boarded the plane, that my mother would park her car in the long-term lot and rush in. No matter how tough my pose, I both wanted and needed her.
By the close of her senior year, Mary had mastered fifteen Arab dialects and won a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the University of Damascus in Syria. I was both jealous and in awe. I made my first, but not my last, joke about our respective majors. "Yours may be Arabic," I said. "It looks like mine is rape."
Mary excelled academically in a way I never could, perhaps in a way I was too distracted to ever attempt. But the truth was, Mary had been escaping via academics for a long time. Raised in a house where my mother's problems provided the glue of family, she patterned herself after my father. Learn a language of another country and then you can go to that country: a place where the problems of your family will not follow. A language they do not speak.
I had not quite given up on the idea of the blissful sibling relationship that my mother wanted for us, but events always conspired, it seemed, to make this impossible. The City of Syracuse scheduled testimony to begin on May 17, the same day as my sister's commencement ceremony at Penn. I continually stole her spotlight whether I wanted to or not.
I talked to Gail. They could not reschedule the trial, but they would lead with the other witnesses and somehow work it so I could testify on the second day. My father and I booked a flight for the evening of the seventeenth. Directly after Mary's graduation, my mother would drop us off at the Philadelphia airport. Until then, my mother, father, and I agreed, Mary's day would be our focus.
My mother, Mary, and I went clothes shopping-Mary for a dress to wear to graduation, me for an outfit for the trial.
Both my sister and I had strayed far from the way we were dressed as children, my mother having a penchant for the colors of the flag. Mary went toward dark greens and creams, I went to black and blue. But for the trial, I ceded my Gothic tendencies to my mother. I put her firmly in control. I would wear, as it resulted, a red blazer, a white blouse, a blue skirt.
In the evening, on the sixteenth, my father and I packed. On the seventeenth, we all dressed in our separate rooms and prepared for the drive down to Penn. I took a last look in my mirror. Whatever the trial's result, my part in it would be over by the time I saw myself there again. I was going to Syracuse and would meet and see many people, but all I thought about was the one appointment I had to keep. I had a date with Gregory Madison. As I opened the door of my bedroom I breathed deeply. I shut myself off. I turned myself on. I was Mary's little sister-excited, ebullient, alive.