"We are all prisoners but some of us are in cells with windows and some without."
I couldn't see it for years but if one of us had a window, it was Maria who was looking out.
"I got off scot-free," I remember saying to Lila. "She'll wear the rape eternally."
I was dancing and falling in love. This time, a boy in Lila's math class: Steve Sherman. I told him about the rape after we had gone to see a movie and had a few drinks. I remember that he was wonderful with it, that he was shocked and horrified but comforting. He knew what to say. Told me I was beautiful, walked me home and kissed me on the cheek. I think he also liked taking care of me. By that Christmas, he became a fixture at our house.
At home my mother was on an upswing too. She was trying new drugs, Elavil and Xanax, and even biorhythm therapies, things she had never considered before. Group therapy was on the horizon. My mother trusting someone other than herself. "You inspire me, kiddo!" she wrote. "If you can go through what you did and go back out, I figure this old gal can too."
I had reached some positive ground zero; the world was new and open to me.
I worked on the literary magazine, The Review, and was chosen to be editor when I became a senior. The English department asked me to represent them in the Glascock Poetry Competition, which was held annually at Mount Holyoke College.
Years before, my mother had fled Mount Holyoke, leaving behind a fellowship for graduate school. She recalls that it felt like a death sentence to her. All her friends were getting married and she, the egghead, was going off to a place full of "nuns and lesbians."
So I went back to reclaim something for my mother and to take the stage for rape. I didn't win. I came in second. I read "Conviction." Reading it aloud had made me shake with it, the truth of my hate. One of the judges, Diane Wakoski, took me aside and told me that subjects like rape had a place in poetry but that I would never win the prizes or cultivate an audience at large that way.
Lila and I thrilled at stupid movies and we saw one the day I got back from Massachusetts, Sylvester Stallone in First Blood. It played at the fifty-cent movie theater near our house. We laughed hysterically at the cartoonish action on the screen in front of us, guffawing so hard we were crying and could barely see or breathe. We would have been kicked out if anyone else had been in the theater to complain but we were alone in the old run-down movie house.
"Me Rambo, you Jane," Lila said, and beat her chest.
"Me good muscle, you girl muscle."
"Grrr."
"Tee-hee."
Near the end of the film someone cleared his throat quite audibly. Lila and I froze but kept staring at the screen. "I thought we were alone," she whispered.
"So did I," I said.
We kept it down and attempted a respectful silence during the final raging shoot-out scenes. We did this by digging our nails into each other's arms and biting our lips. We giggled but we did not erupt fully.
When it was over, and the lights went up, we were alone again. We started letting out what we had held back until we turned the corner and saw the manager of the theater standing there.
"You think Vietnam is funny?"
He was an imposing man; muscle gone to fat and with a pencil mustache that slid across his upper lip, like Madison's first attorney.
"No," we both said.
He blocked our way to the exit.
"Certainly sounded like you were laughing to me," he said.
"It's pretty exaggerated," I said, expecting him to see my point.
"I was in 'Nam," he said. "Were you?"
Lila was scared and holding on to my hand.
I said, "No, sir, and I respect the veterans that fought. We didn't mean to offend. We were laughing because we found the level of machismo exaggerated."
He stared at me as if I had blocked him with reason when what I had really blocked him with were words found inside me when under threat: a skill I now had.
He let us pass but warned us he did not want to see us again in his theater.
We didn't even try to get our giddy mood back. I was furious as we walked down the hill toward home. "It sucks being a woman," I said, stating the obvious. "You always get smashed!"
Lila wasn't ready to go there yet. She was busy trying to see his point. In my mind I was doing now what I did more and more of: fighting a man hand to hand and no matter how I played it, losing every time.
There were good men and bad, thinking men and muscle. I made that separation in my mind. I began to categorize them this way. Steve, who had a sort of ropy runner's body, was gentle in his movements and cared most about his studies. He would sit for hours until he had memorized-verbatim-the chapters of his textbooks. His Ukrainian-immigrant parents were paying cash for his education as they had for their cars and house. It was expected that he would study every day for hours.
I began a sort of unconscious lying to myself when engaged in sex. Steve's pleasure was all I focused on, the point of the journey, so if there were bumps and memories, painful flashes of the night in the tunnel, I rode over them, numbed. Happy when Steve was happy, I was always ready to pop right out of bed and go on a walk or read my latest poem. If I could get back to the brain in time, like oxygen, the sex didn't hurt as much.
And there was the color of his skin. I could focus on a patch of white flesh and begin. As Steve was being gentle and ardent, inside I was talking myself down the path again. "This is not Thorden Park, he is your friend, Gregory Madison is in Attica, you are fine." It often worked to get me through it, like gritting your teeth on a frightening carnival ride that those around you appear to enjoy. If you can't do, mimic. Your brain is still alive.
By late in the year I had established myself as a sort of chubby New Age diva. The art students knew who I was and so did the poets. I threw a party with the confidence it would be packed and it was. Steve bought me white vinyl dance versions of my favorite songs and made dance tapes from them.
Mary Alice and Casey were back from London and showed up. The whole apartment house throbbed, but this time it was with my music and my friends. I had gotten A's in Carruth's and Carver's independents and was now taking a class with a poet named Jack Gilbert. I couldn't believe my luck. Even Gilbert showed up! In the kitchen a trash can full of rotgut punch had more and more ingredients added as the party-goers got drunk. Lila's spices were being pitched in wholesale and small things, like forks and houseplants, joined the nutmeg and arrowroot.
Suddenly people we didn't know began to show up-boys. They were loud and strong and went for the pretty girls like magnets. This meant Mary Alice, who, by that time, was very drunk. The dancing on the dance floor got sexual. Steve almost had a fight with a stranger who was moving in on one of his female friends. The music got louder, a speaker blew, the booze ran out. All of this resulted in the sanest and soberest, who had not left already, peeling out. I stood like a barking Scottie by Mary Alice. When boys came toward her I steered them off. I threatened them with what they respected: a man. Mary Alice's boyfriend, I lied, was the captain of the basketball team and due soon with his teammates. If they doubted me I got up in their faces and did my straight-shooting act. I had listened to the detectives and how they talked, knew how to sound streetwise.
Mary Alice decided to leave and Steve and I found her a person we trusted to take her home. Near the door, as we were saying good-bye, she passed out. I and those around us stood and stared at her as she lay unconscious on the floor. I thought she was faking and at first said, "Come on, Mary Alice, get up." Her hair had been so beautiful as she fell, the long golden mane swinging up and out.