I was drained. Though it took me a while to realize it, I, too, had been remanded. I would be held over for a long time.
On June 2, I received a letter from the probation department of the County of Onondaga. They wrote to inform me that they were conducting "a pre-sentence investigation of a young man who was recently found guilty after trial of Rape First Degree, Sodomy First Degree and other related charges. These charges," the letter stated, "stem from an incident in which you were the victim." They wrote to inquire if I had any input on the sentencing recommendation.
I wrote back. I recommended the maximum sentence allowable under the law, and quoted Madison calling me "the worst bitch." I knew Syracuse had been voted the seventh-best city to live in that year, and I pointedly stated that having men like Madison on the streets wouldn't bolster this reputation. I knew my best hope to be heard was by making the point that a maximum sentence would make the men who sentenced him look good. That way they wouldn't be doing it for me, but for the people who elected them and paid their salaries. I knew this. Whatever skills I had, I used.
I closed my letter by signing it over my title: victim.
On July 13, 1982, in a court where Gorman presided, and Mastine, Paquette, and Madison were in attendance, Gregory Madison was sentenced. It was the maximum for rape and sodomy: eight and a third to twenty-five years. The larger sentences, along with lesser ones given for the four remaining charges, would run concurrently. Mastine called to tell me. He also informed me that Gail had given birth. My mother and I went shopping for a gift. When I saw Gail fifteen years later, she brought the gift along to show me she remembered.
TWELVE
That summer I began my makeover. I had been raped but I had also been raised on Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue. The possibilities of the before-and-after that I had been presented with all my life took hold. Besides, those around me-namely my mother now, with my sister working in Washington before leaving for Syria, and my father off in Spain-encouraged me to move on with my life. "You don't want to become defined by the rape," she said, and I agreed.
I got a job in an ill-fated T-shirt shop where I was the only employee. I stamped badges in an unventilated attic and did sloppy silk-screening for local softball teams. My boss, who was twenty-three, was out hustling up business around town. Sometimes he was drunk and showed up with his buddies to watch TV I was wearing huge clothes at the time, ones I made myself, what even my mother called tent dresses. And I wore a lot of them in the June and July heat of 1982. One day when my boss and his friends taunted me to show a little flesh, I turned around and walked out. I drove home in my father's car, covered in inks.
It was just me and my mother again, like the summer when I turned fifteen. I kept looking for another job-my journal is full of shoe-store interviews and office-supply-store applications-but like in any suburb during the summer, jobs were scarce once midsummer hit. Mom was trying to lose weight. I decided to join her. We watched Richard Simmons and bought an exercise bike. I have a memory of the Scarsdale diet, small, measured steak and chicken bits that we could barely get down. "This diet is costing a fortune," my mother said as we ate more meat that summer than I have since.
But I began to take off pounds. I would sit in front of the television in the morning and watch obese women cry with Simmons, setting off a sort of round-robin of tears among the guest, Simmons, and the studio audience. Sometimes I cried too. Not because I thought I was as fat as the women on the screen but because I thought I knew exactly how ugly they felt. I might have been able to get down the street without being called names and I could see my shoelaces over my belt, but I identified with Simmons's guests as I did with no one else. They were the walking, talking ostracized who had done nothing wrong.
So I cried. And I got on that bike. And I hated my body. I used that hate to shed fifteen pounds.
In late summer, after my father had returned from Spain, the three of us were out in the yard doing yard work. I was supposed to ride the ride-on mower. A typical Sebold fight erupted. I didn't want to, etc. Why did Mary get to go live in D.C. and then go to Syria? My father called me ungrateful. It escalated. Suddenly, just as it was traveling down the familiar path to all-out shouting, I burst into tears. I started crying but couldn't stop. I ran inside up to my room. Trying to sop up the tears was futile. I cried until I was spent, dehydrated, my eyes and the flesh around them a site map of broken capillaries.
Later, I didn't want to talk about it; I was putting the rape and the trial behind me.
Lila and I wrote back and forth to each other all summer. She was dieting too. Our letters to one another read like journal entries, long, pondering pieces written to have company during the writing as much as to really share any information bulletins about ourselves. We were hot and bored, nineteen and stuck at home with our parents. We told each other our life stories in those rambling letters. How we felt about everything from our individual family members to boys we knew at school. I don't remember writing her about the trial in detail. If I did, her letters don't reflect it. I got one postcard in the early summer congratulating me. That's it. It disappeared from our landscape after that.
As it did from almost everyone's. The trial seemed to have provided a very solid and heavy back door to the whole thing. Anyone who had actually entered that house with me, looked or walked into the rooms there, was very happy to finally leave the place. The door was shut. I remember agreeing with my mother that I had gone through a death-and-rebirth phenomenon in the span of one year. Rape to trial. Now the land was new and I could make of it anything I wished.
Lila, Sue, and I planned, via our letters, for the coming year. Lila was bringing a kitten down from a litter at home. I had made a pact with my mother: If I jumped up and down enough on a couch that she hated, we might convince my father when he returned from Spain that I should take it to school. I rented a truck with Sue, who lived nearby. My mother was cheery and sent me off with new clothes that fit my new figure. This was going to be the turnaround year. I was going to do what I called "live normal" now.
That fall, Mary Alice was in London in an exchange program. So were other friends. Tess was on leave. I missed them only vaguely. Lila was my living, breathing soul mate. We went everywhere together and cooked up crazy schemes. We both wanted boyfriends. I played the role of the experienced one to Lila's innocent. Over the summer I had made us matching skirts. We wore these and anything black whenever we went out.
Ken Childs was at a loss without Casey, who was also in London, and we began to pal around. I thought he was cute and, the most important fact, he already knew about me. The three of us went dancing together at on-campus clubs and art-student parties. I wanted to be a lawyer now. People liked hearing this ambition so I said it a lot. Because of Tess, I wanted to go to Ireland; I told people that too. I went to poetry and fiction readings and indulged in the wine and cheese. I took an independent study in poetry with Hayden Carruth and an independent with Raymond Carver, whom I've always thought Tess had assigned to baby-sit me.
One day I ran into Maria Flores on the street. I had written her a triumphant letter early in the summer about the trial. I told her that I had felt her there with me in the courtroom and that I hoped she could take some solace in this. Her letter back was, to be honest, too real for me. "I have a brace on my leg. My ankle is healed and I walk with a cane due to nerve damage. My suicidal tendencies have lessened though frankly, they aren't all gone." She worried about her cane inhibiting her from meeting new people and felt ashamed that she had not completed her job as a resident advisor. She ended the letter with a quote from Kahlil Gibran: