That same afternoon, a boy from our church, the older brother of a friend of mine, stopped by the house. I was on the porch in my nightgown. My sister was up in her room.
"Girls, Jonathan's here to visit," my mother called from the front hall.
Perhaps it was his sandy-blond hair, or the fact that he had already graduated from college and had landed a job in Scotland, or that his mother thought so highly of him, and as a result, we knew almost every item of his golden-boy resume; whatever the case, my sister and I had an unspoken and mutual crush. We entered the hall at the same time, I from the back of the house, my sister descending the spiral staircase in the front hall. His eyes were on her as she stepped down. My sister did not flounce. I could not accuse her of being coy or flirtatious or otherwise unfairly competitive. She was pretty. He was smiling up at her and the initial niceties of "How are you?" "Fine. How are you?" had begun. Then he noticed me standing in the doorway of the living room. It was as if his eye landed on a thing that didn't belong.
We talked for a minute or two. My sister and Jonathan moved into the living room and I excused myself. I returned to the back of the house, shut the door to the family room, moved onto the porch, and sat with my back facing the house. I cried. The words "nice boys" entered my mind. I had seen how Jonathan looked at me and was now convinced: No nice boy will ever want me. I was all those horrible words used for rape; I was changed, bloodied, damaged goods, ruined.
When Jonathan left, my sister was giddy.
I moved to the doorway to the family room. They hadn't seen me, but through the window leading onto the porch I'd heard my sister's gleeful voice.
"I think he likes you," my mother said.
"Really?" asked my sister, the pitch of her voice rising on the second syllable.
"It sure looked like it to me," my mother replied.
"He likes Mary," I said, making my presence known, "because Mary wasn't raped!"
"Alice," my mother said, "don't do this."
"He's a nice boy," I said. "No nice boy is ever going to want me."
My sister was dumbfounded. Talk about sinking her ship. She had been buoyant, which she deserved. In the week following her homecoming, she had spent most of her time in her room, out of the fray and away from the limelight.
"Alice," said my mother, "that's not true."
"Yes, it is. You should have seen the way he looked at me. He couldn't deal."
My voice was raised. As a result, my father stirred from his academic lockdown in the study.
"What's all the commotion?" he asked, entering the family room. He held his reading glasses in his right hand and looked, as he frequently did, as if he had been rudely awakened from life in eighteenth-century Spain.
"Thanks for joining us, Bud," my mother said. "Stay out of this."
"No nice boy is ever going to want me," I said again.
My father, without any context, was horrified. "Alice, why would you say a thing like that?"
"Because it's true!" I yelled. "Because I was raped and now no one will want me."
"That's preposterous," he said. "You're a beautiful girl; of course nice boys will ask you out."
"Bullshit. Nice boys don't ask rape victims out!"
I was really blaring it now. My sister retreated from the room and I yelled up after her, "Fine, go write it in your journal. 'A nice boy came to see me today.' I'll never write that."
"Leave your sister out of this," my mother said.
"What makes her so special? She gets to stay up in her room while you put me on suicide watch. Dad is walking around like I'm going to fall apart if he touches me, and you're hiding in the laundry room to have your flaps!"
"Now, Alice," my father said, "you're just upset."
My mother began rubbing her chest.
"Your mother and I are doing the best we can," my father said. "We just don't know what to do."
"You could say the word for starters," I said, stilled now, my face hot with screaming, but tears making their way up again.
"What word?"
"Rape, Dad," I said. "Rape. The reason why people are staring at me, the reason why you don't know what to do, why those old ladies are coming over and Mom is flipped out, why Jonathan Gulick stared at me like a freak. Okay!"
"Calm down, Alice," my father was saying, "you're upsetting your mother."
It was true. My mother had edged over to the far end of the couch-away from us. She was bent over with one hand on her head and one rubbing the center of her chest. I openly resented her then. Resented how attention always focused on the weakest one.
The doorbell rang. It was Tom McAllister. A year older than I, he was the most handsome boy I knew. My mother thought he looked like the actor Tom Selleck. I had not seen Tom since the midnight service at Christmas Eve. We had been singing a hymn. At the close of the hymn, when I turned around in my pew, he smiled at me.
While my father answered the door to welcome him, I slipped down the back hall to wash my face in the downstairs bathroom. I splashed cold water on my face and tried to finger-comb my hair.
I arranged my robe so it covered the necklace of bruises from the rapist's hands. I cried so much each day my eyes were permanently swollen. I wished I looked better. Pretty, like my sister.
My mother and father had invited Tom out onto the porch. When I joined them, he stood up from the couch he'd been sitting on.
"These are for you," he said, and handed me a bouquet of flowers. "I got you a present too. My mom helped me pick it out."
He was staring at me. But under his scrutiny I felt different than I had with Jonathan Gulick.
My mother brought us sodas and then, after a brief exchange with Tom about his classes at Temple, she took the flowers inside to put them in water, and my father left the porch and went to read in the living room.
We sat down on the couch. I busied myself with opening the gift. It was a mug, with a cartoon of a cat holding a bunch of balloons-the kind of gift that, in another mood, I would have disdained. It seemed beautiful to me and my thanks to Tom were sincere. This was my nice boy.
"You look better than I thought," he said.
"Thank you."
"Reverend Breuninger made it sound like you were pretty badly beaten."
I realized that, unlike the old ladies, he saw nothing hidden in those words.
"You know, don't you?" I said.
His face was blank. "Know what?"
"What really happened to me."
"They said in church you were robbed in a park."
I watched him intently. I was unflinching.
"I was raped, Tom," I said.
He was stunned.
"You can leave if you want," I said. I stared down at the mug in my hands.
"I didn't know, nobody told me," he said. "I'm so sorry."
While he said this, and meant it, he also pulled away from me. His posture grew more erect. Without actually getting up to move away, he seemed to invite in as much air as could fit in the space between us.
"You know now," I said. "Does it change how you feel about me?"
He couldn't win. What could he say? Of course it must have affected him. I'm sure it did, but I didn't want the answer I know now, I wanted what he said.
"No, of course not. It's just, wow, I don't know what to say."
What I took away from that afternoon, besides his assurance that he would call me soon and we would see each other again, was that one word to my question: no.
Of course, I didn't really believe him. I was smart enough to know he was saying what any nice boy would. I was raised to be a good girl; I knew what to say at the right moment too. But because he was a boy my age, he became heroic in proportion to any other visitor. No old lady, not even Myra, could give me what Tom had given me, and my mother knew it. She talked Tom up all that week, and my father, who had gleefully derided a boy who had dared to ask once what country they spoke Latin in, played along. I did too, even though we all knew we were clinging to the wreckage; it was useless to pretend I hadn't changed.