Having enjoyed a novel by Alice Sebold, I picked up this memoir describing her rape at 18 while she was an undergraduate at Syracuse University. I was immediately pulled into Sebold’s harrowing account. She characterizes her childhood as sheltered. She grew up in a middle-class family. Her father was a college university professor of Spanish literature, and her mother worked for magazines before she became a full-time housewife. Early in Sebold’s childhood, her mother became an alcoholic. After about ten years, she achieved sobriety, but she still was affected by a nervous condition, Sebold and her sister called “the flaps.” Their mother would periodically experience panic attacks, rendering her unable to function. Because Sebold was afraid of setting off one of these attacks, she didn’t call her home immediately to let her parents know of her rape.
It happened one evening of the last days of the spring semester on the Syracuse campus. Sebold was walking near an amphitheater tunnel when she was grabbed from behind. Her rape was violent, brutal and she thought the man was going to kill her. He repeatedly slammed her head on the pavement. To survive, she appeased him and tried to get him to see her as a person. Beaten and bloodied, she managed to limp to her dorm, where her friends immediately brought her to the hospital.
Sebold recounts in vivid detail the nurses she encountered, the interviews she gave to police, and the aftermath when she went home to the protective environment. The rapist wasn’t caught. The summer break gave her a chance to recover from her physical wounds. Mentally, her healing would take much longer.
To her friends’ and classmates’ astonishment, Sebold returned to campus for the fall semester. She was defiant about not letting the attack define her. It was, however, a challenge to feel the eyes on her knowing so many people knew she was the girl who had been raped. She stuck close to a small group of friends.
One afternoon, she saw the man from behind whom she thought had attacked her. With her heart pounding, she angled around to get a better look. The man, in turn, saw her and remarked, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” He smirked at her. Sebold had the man arrested and relates an incident as she viewed a suspect lineup. She misidentified the man initially. This would be critical to the case.
Many, including the policeman involved, said Sebold provided the best testimony by a rape victim. She provided precise details of the horrific assault, held up well against the defense attorney’s questioning, and was unwavering in her belief that the man sitting in the courtroom had attacked her. She writes of the rape and the trial simply but creates a visceral reaction to those reading her account.
After reading this book, I found out that the convicted rapist was recently exonerated of charges and set free from prison after sixteen years of serving time. The evidence based on a match of the suspect’s hair was thrown out. My thoughts about the book itself haven’t changed regarding the power of Sebold’s writing and the courage, even humor, she displayed as a young adult. There was more than one victim here. I understand that the publisher is pulling the book and having Sebold revise it, considering the overturned conviction. This book will hit a nerve in some, especially victims of assault.
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Lucky Kindle Edition
The timeless, fearless, #1 New York Times bestselling memoir from the author of The Lovely Bones—a powerful account of her sexual assault at the age of eighteen and the harrowing trial that followed, now with a new afterword by the author.
In a memoir hailed for its searing candor, as well as its wit, Alice Sebold reveals how her life was transformed when, as an eighteen-year-old college freshman, she was brutally raped and beaten in a park near campus. What ultimately propels this chronicle of sexual assault and its aftermath is Sebold’s indomitable spirit, as she fights to secure her rapist’s arrest and conviction and comes to terms with a relationship to the world that has forever changed. With over a million copies in print, Lucky has touched the lives of a generation of readers. Sebold illuminates the experience of trauma victims and imparts a wisdom profoundly hard-won: “You save yourself or you remain unsaved.” Now reissued with a new afterword by the author, her story remains as urgent as it was when it was first published more than twenty years ago.
In a memoir hailed for its searing candor, as well as its wit, Alice Sebold reveals how her life was transformed when, as an eighteen-year-old college freshman, she was brutally raped and beaten in a park near campus. What ultimately propels this chronicle of sexual assault and its aftermath is Sebold’s indomitable spirit, as she fights to secure her rapist’s arrest and conviction and comes to terms with a relationship to the world that has forever changed. With over a million copies in print, Lucky has touched the lives of a generation of readers. Sebold illuminates the experience of trauma victims and imparts a wisdom profoundly hard-won: “You save yourself or you remain unsaved.” Now reissued with a new afterword by the author, her story remains as urgent as it was when it was first published more than twenty years ago.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherScribner
- Publication dateSeptember 17, 2009
- File size1271 KB
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
When Sebold, the author of the current bestseller The Lovely Bones, was a college freshman at Syracuse University, she was attacked and raped on the last night of school, forced onto the ground in a tunnel "among the dead leaves and broken beer bottles." In a ham-handed attempt to mollify her, a policeman later told her that a young woman had been murdered there and, by comparison, Sebold should consider herself lucky. That dubious "luck" is the focus of this fiercely observed memoir about how an incident of such profound violence can change the course of one's life. Sebold launches her memoir headlong into the rape itself, laying out its visceral physical as well as mental violence, and from there spins a narrative of her life before and after the incident, weaving memories of parental alcoholism together with her post-rape addiction to heroin. In the midst of each wrenching episode, from the initial attack to the ensuing courtroom drama, Sebold's wit is as powerful as her searing candor, as she describes her emotional denial, her addiction and even the rape (her first "real" sexual experience). She skillfully captures evocative moments, such as, during her girlhood, luring one of her family's basset hounds onto a blue silk sofa (strictly off-limits to both kids and pets) to nettle her father. Addressing rape as a larger social issue, Sebold's account reveals that there are clear emotional boundaries between those who have been victims of violence and those who have not, though the author attempts to blur these lines as much as possible to show that violence touches many more lives than solely the victim's.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Sebold was raped as a college freshman, but the police said she was "lucky." At least she wasn't murdered and dismembered like the girl before her. Now a journalist, Sebold here details the aftermathAposttraumatic stress syndrome, heroin addiction, and, finally, some measure of understanding. This book is based partly on a feature appearing in the New York Times Sunday Magazine that prompted an appearance on Oprah.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
A stunningly crafted and unsparing account of the authors rape as a college freshman and what it took to win her case in court. In 1981, Sebold was brutally raped on her college campus, at Syracuse University. Sebold, a New York Times Magazine contributor, now in her 30s, reconstructs the rape and the year following in which her assailant was brought to trial and found guilty. When, months after the rape, she confided in her fiction professor, Tobias Wolff, he advised: Try, if you can, to remember everything. Sebold heeded his words, and the result is a memoir that reads like detective fiction, replete with police jargon, economical characterization, and filmlike scene construction. Part of Sebolds ironic luck, besides the fact that she wasnt killed, was that she was a virgin prior to the rape, she was wearing bulky clothing, and her rapist beat her, leaving unmistakable evidence of violence. Sebold casts a cool eye on these facts: The cosmetics of rape are central to proving any case. Sebold critiques the sexism and misconceptions surrounding rape with neither rhetoric nor apology; she lets her experience speak for itself. Her family, her friends, her campus community are all shaken by the brutality she survived, yet Sebold finds herself feeling more affinity with police officers she meets, as it was in [their] world where this hideous thing had happened to me. A world of violent crime. Just when Sebold believes she might surface from this world, a close friend is raped and the haunting continues. The last section, Aftermath, has an unavoidable tacked-on-at-the-end feel, as Sebold crams over a decades worth of coping and healing into a short chapter. Told with mettle and intelligence, Sebolds story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will inspire and challenge. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
Carolyn See author of The Handyman and Golden Days This book proves at once the astounding bravery of Alice Sebold in the face of dreadful circumstance and the extraordinary power of words to heal. Sebold has made beauty out of agony.
Margot Livesey author of Criminals Reading Lucky, which I did in a single sitting, I was struck by the awful solitude that violence brings, both at the moment and in its aftermath. In this brilliant, eloquent, funny, precise account of how she survived rape and the pursuit of justice, Alice Sebold has triumphantly broken that solitude. We, her readers, are the fortunate beneficiaries.
“An important book for learning to say ‘me too.'" (Elena Ferrante )
“A rueful, razor-sharp memoir…funnier than you’d think was possible....Sebold’s commanding skill as a narrator (at her best, describing the awful crime itself, she brings to mind a fierce young Joan Didion) forces you to relive her terror....This is a brave and modest work of demystification.... She tells what it’s like to go through a particular kind of nightmare in order to tell what it’s like—slowly, bumpily, triumphantly—to heal.”
(Sarah Kerr Vogue)
"In the midst of each wrenching episode, from the initial attack to the ensuing courtroom drama, Sebold's wit is as powerful as her searing candor... a fiercely observed memoir about how an incident of such profound violence can change the course of one's life." (Publishers Weekly)
"A stunningly crafted and unsparing account... a memoir that reads like detective fiction... told with mettle and intelligence, Sebold's story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will inspire and challenge." (Kirkus Reviews)
"Lucky-- which reads like a John Grisham page-turner-- can't help but haunt you... Sebold's is a story about having the courage to speak about the unspeakable."
(Sheryl Altman Biography)
"Reading Lucky, which I did in a single sitting, I was struck by the awful solitude that violence brings, both at the moment and in its aftermath. In this brilliant, eloquent, funny, precise account of how she survived rape and the pursuit of justice, Alice Sebold has triumphantly broken that solitude. We, her readers, are the fortunate beneficiaries." (Margot Livesey )
"This book proves at once the astounding bravery of Alice Sebold in the face of dreadful circumstance and the extraordinary power of words to heal. Sebold has made beauty out of agony." (Carolyn See )
"Sharp-eyed and unsentimental... It's hard to believe that a book about brutal rape and its aftermath could actually be inspirational. But despite its disturbing subject, Alice Sebold's Lucky is exhilirating to read. Raped in a tunnel when she was a freshman at Syracuse University, the ironic, nervy Sebold refused to let the experience diminish her... or her sense of humor... Reading Lucky, you understand how Sebold succeeded in persuading a judge that what happened to her occurred precisely-- word for word, detail for detail-- the way she described it." (Francine Prose Elle)
"This carefully detailed memoir is a tour de force of memory and rage." (Self)
"A harrowing story that's still vibrating and flexible... Give Alice Sebold your attention for her first five pages and you're in for the whole ride." (Sally Eckhoff Salon)
"A vivid account of Sebold's rape and its effect on her and her family... the rape is only the beginning of Sebold's story." (Dennis McLellan Los Angeles Times)
“A literary memoir that shines with personality. There is such openness in Sebold’s brash, vibrant style that the book feels like the long version of a friend’s breathless account of an ordeal.” (Carmen Schneidel Time Out New York)
“Gruesome and strangely enchanting... A controlled and meticulous account... The quiet achievement of Sebold’s memoir is that she handles her subject with the integrity of a journalist and the care of a survivor... It succeeds not just as a record of one woman's pain and healing, but as fine creative nonfiction.” (Casey Greenfield Newsday)
“Eloquent... Sebold’s opening scene is as gripping and terrifying as any in a film....Her voice is a powerful new plea to break the silence that still clings to this taboo, and little understood, subject... this powerful memoir leaves it to readers to decide how lucky Sebold was.” (Joan Ullman Cleveland Plain Dealer)
Margot Livesey author of Criminals Reading Lucky, which I did in a single sitting, I was struck by the awful solitude that violence brings, both at the moment and in its aftermath. In this brilliant, eloquent, funny, precise account of how she survived rape and the pursuit of justice, Alice Sebold has triumphantly broken that solitude. We, her readers, are the fortunate beneficiaries.
“An important book for learning to say ‘me too.'" (Elena Ferrante )
“A rueful, razor-sharp memoir…funnier than you’d think was possible....Sebold’s commanding skill as a narrator (at her best, describing the awful crime itself, she brings to mind a fierce young Joan Didion) forces you to relive her terror....This is a brave and modest work of demystification.... She tells what it’s like to go through a particular kind of nightmare in order to tell what it’s like—slowly, bumpily, triumphantly—to heal.”
(Sarah Kerr Vogue)
"In the midst of each wrenching episode, from the initial attack to the ensuing courtroom drama, Sebold's wit is as powerful as her searing candor... a fiercely observed memoir about how an incident of such profound violence can change the course of one's life." (Publishers Weekly)
"A stunningly crafted and unsparing account... a memoir that reads like detective fiction... told with mettle and intelligence, Sebold's story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will inspire and challenge." (Kirkus Reviews)
"Lucky-- which reads like a John Grisham page-turner-- can't help but haunt you... Sebold's is a story about having the courage to speak about the unspeakable."
(Sheryl Altman Biography)
"Reading Lucky, which I did in a single sitting, I was struck by the awful solitude that violence brings, both at the moment and in its aftermath. In this brilliant, eloquent, funny, precise account of how she survived rape and the pursuit of justice, Alice Sebold has triumphantly broken that solitude. We, her readers, are the fortunate beneficiaries." (Margot Livesey )
"This book proves at once the astounding bravery of Alice Sebold in the face of dreadful circumstance and the extraordinary power of words to heal. Sebold has made beauty out of agony." (Carolyn See )
"Sharp-eyed and unsentimental... It's hard to believe that a book about brutal rape and its aftermath could actually be inspirational. But despite its disturbing subject, Alice Sebold's Lucky is exhilirating to read. Raped in a tunnel when she was a freshman at Syracuse University, the ironic, nervy Sebold refused to let the experience diminish her... or her sense of humor... Reading Lucky, you understand how Sebold succeeded in persuading a judge that what happened to her occurred precisely-- word for word, detail for detail-- the way she described it." (Francine Prose Elle)
"This carefully detailed memoir is a tour de force of memory and rage." (Self)
"A harrowing story that's still vibrating and flexible... Give Alice Sebold your attention for her first five pages and you're in for the whole ride." (Sally Eckhoff Salon)
"A vivid account of Sebold's rape and its effect on her and her family... the rape is only the beginning of Sebold's story." (Dennis McLellan Los Angeles Times)
“A literary memoir that shines with personality. There is such openness in Sebold’s brash, vibrant style that the book feels like the long version of a friend’s breathless account of an ordeal.” (Carmen Schneidel Time Out New York)
“Gruesome and strangely enchanting... A controlled and meticulous account... The quiet achievement of Sebold’s memoir is that she handles her subject with the integrity of a journalist and the care of a survivor... It succeeds not just as a record of one woman's pain and healing, but as fine creative nonfiction.” (Casey Greenfield Newsday)
“Eloquent... Sebold’s opening scene is as gripping and terrifying as any in a film....Her voice is a powerful new plea to break the silence that still clings to this taboo, and little understood, subject... this powerful memoir leaves it to readers to decide how lucky Sebold was.” (Joan Ullman Cleveland Plain Dealer)
About the Author
Alice Sebold is the author of three #1 bestselling books, including Lucky, and the novels The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon. Her work has been translated into more than fifty languages and has appeared in The New York Times and The Guardian, among other publications. She is a member of the National Leadership Council for RAINN.org (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network). She lives in California.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
This is what I remember. My lips were cut. I bit down on them when he grabbed me from behind and covered my mouth. He said these words: "I'll kill you if you scream." I remained motionless. "Do you understand? If you scream you're dead." I nodded my head. My arms were pinned to my sides by his right arm wrapped around me and my mouth was covered with his left.
He released his hand from my mouth.
I screamed. Quickly. Abruptly.
The struggle began.
He covered my mouth again. He kneed me in the back of my legs so that I would fall down. "You don't get it, bitch. I'll kill you. I've got a knife. I'll kill you." He released his grip on my mouth again and I fell, screaming, on the brick path. He straddled me and kicked me in the side. I made sounds, they were nothing, they were soft footfalls. They urged him on, they made him righteous. I scrambled on the path. I was wearing soft-soled moccasins with which I tried to land wild kicks. Everything missed or merely grazed him. I had never fought before, was chosen last in gym.
Somehow, I don't remember how, I made it back on my feet. I remember biting him, pushing him, I don't know what. Then I began to run. Like a giant who is all powerful, he reached out and grabbed the end of my long brown hair. He yanked it hard and brought me down onto my knees in front of him. That was my first missed escape, the hair, the woman's long hair.
"You asked for it now," he said, and I began to beg.
He reached around to his back pocket to draw out a knife. I struggled still, my hair coming out painfully from my skull as I did my best to rip myself free of his grip. I lunged forward and grabbed his left leg with both arms, throwing him off balance and making him stagger. I would not know it until the police found it later in the grass, a few feet away from my broken glasses, but with that move, the knife fell from his hands and was lost.
Then it was fists.
Maybe he was angry at the loss of his weapon or at my disobedience. Whatever the reason, this marked the end of the preliminaries. I was on the ground on my stomach. He sat on my back. He pounded my skull into the brick. He cursed me. He turned me around and sat on my chest. I was babbling. I was begging. Here is where he wrapped his hands around my neck and began to squeeze. For a second, I lost consciousness. When I came to, I knew I was staring up into the eyes of the man who would kill me.
At that moment I signed myself over to him. I was convinced that I would not live. I could not fight anymore. He was going to do what he wanted to me. That was it.
Everything slowed down. He stood up and began dragging me over the grass by my hair. I twisted and half crawled, trying to keep up with him. Dimly, I had seen the dark entrance of the amphitheater tunnel from the path. As we neared it, and I realized it was our destination, a rush of fear ran through me. I knew I would die.
There was an old iron fence a few feet out from the tunnel entrance. It was three feet high and provided a narrow space through which you had to walk in order to enter the tunnel. As he dragged me, as I scrambled against the grass, I caught sight of that fence and became utterly convinced that if he brought me beyond this point, I would not survive.
For a moment, as he dragged me across the ground, I clung feebly to the bottom of that iron fence, before a rough pull yanked me clean. People think a woman stops fighting when she is physically exhausted, but I was about to begin my real fight, a fight of words and lies and the brain.
When people talk about climbing a mountain or riding rough water, they say they became one with it, their bodies so attuned to it that they often, when asked to articulate how they did it, cannot fully explain.
Inside the tunnel, where broken beer bottles, old leaves, and other, as yet indiscriminate, things littered the ground, I became one with this man. He held my life in his hand. Those who say they would rather fight to the death than be raped are fools. I would rather be raped a thousand times. You do what you have to.
"Stand up," he said.
I did.
I was shivering uncontrollably. It was cold out and the cold combined with the fear, with the exhaustion, made me shake from head to toe.
He dumped my purse and bag of books in the corner of the sealed-off tunnel.
"Take off your clothes."
"I have eight dollars in my back pocket," I said. "My mother has credit cards. My sister does too."
"I don't want your money," he said, and laughed.
I looked at him. Into his eyes now, as if he was a human being, as if I could speak to him.
"Please don't rape me," I said.
"Take off your clothes."
"I'm a virgin," I said.
He didn't believe me. Repeated his command. "Take off your clothes."
My hands were shaking and I couldn't control them. He pulled me forward by my belt until my body was up against his, which was up against the tunnel's back wall.
"Kiss me," he said.
And he drew my head forward and our lips met. My lips were pursed tightly together. He tugged harder on my belt, my body pressing up further against his. He grabbed my hair in his fist and balled it up. He drew my head back and looked at me. I began to cry, to plead.
"Please don't," I said. "Please."
"Shut up."
He kissed me again and this time, he inserted his tongue in my mouth. By pleading, I had left myself open to this. Again he pulled my head back roughly. "Kiss back," he said.
And I did.
When he was satisfied, he stopped and tried to work the latch on my belt. It was a belt with a strange buckle and he couldn't figure it out. To have him let go of me, for him to leave me alone, I said, "Let me, I'll do it."
He watched me.
When I was done, he unzipped the jeans I wore.
"Now take off your shirt."
I had a cardigan sweater on. I took that off. He reached over to help unbutton my shirt. He fumbled.
"I'll do it," I said again.
I unbuttoned the oxford-cloth shirt and, like the cardigan, I peeled it back from my body. It was like shedding feathers. Or wings.
"Now the bra."
I did.
He reached out and grabbed them -- my breasts -- in his two hands. He plied them and squeezed them, manipulating them right down to my ribs. Twisting. I hope that to say this hurt isn't necessary here.
"Please don't do this, please," I said.
"Nice white titties," he said. And the words made me give them up, lobbing off each part of my body as he claimed ownership -- the mouth, the tongue, my breasts.
"I'm cold," I said.
"Lay down."
"On the ground?" I asked, stupidly, hopelessly. I saw, among the leaves and glass, the grave. My body stretched out, disassembled, gagged, dead.
I sat first, kind of stumbled into a seated position. He took the end of my pants and tugged. As I tried to hide my nakedness -- at least I had my underpants on -- he looked down at my body. I still feel that in that gaze his eyes lit up my sickly pale skin in that dark tunnel. Made it all -- my flesh -- suddenly horrible. Ugly too kind a word, but the closest one.
"You're the worst bitch I ever done this to," he said. It was said in disgust, it was said in analysis. He saw what he had bagged and didn't like his catch.
No matter, he would finish.
Here, I began to combine truth with fiction, using anything to try and get him to come over to my side. To see me as pitiful, for him to see me as worse off than him.
"I'm a foster child," I said. "I don't even know who my parents are. Please don't do this. I'm a virgin," I said.
"Lie down."
I did. Shaking, I crawled over and lay face up against the cold ground. He pulled my underpants off me roughly and bundled them into his hand. He threw them away from me and into a corner where I lost sight of them.
I watched him as he unzipped his pants and let them fall around his ankles.
He lay down on top of me and started humping. I was familiar with this. This was what Steve, a boy I liked in high school, had done against my leg, because I would not let him do what he wanted most, which was to make love to me. With Steve I was fully dressed and so was he. He went home frustrated and I felt safe. My parents were upstairs the whole time. I told myself Steve loved me.
He worked away on me, reaching down to work with his penis.
I stared right into his eyes. I was too afraid not to. If I shut my eyes, I believed, I would disappear. To make it through, I had to be present the whole time.
He called me bitch. He told me I was dry.
"I'm sorry," I said -- I never stopped apologizing. "I'm a virgin," I said.
"Stop looking at me," he said. "Shut your eyes. Stop shaking."
"I can't."
"Stop it or you'll be sorry."
I did. My focus became acute. I stared harder than ever at him. He began to knead his fist against the opening of my vagina. Inserted his fingers into it, three or four at a time. Something tore. I began to bleed there. I was wet now.
It made him excited. He was intrigued. As he worked his whole fist up into my vagina and pumped it, I went into my brain. Waiting there were poems for me, poems I'd learned in class: Olga Cabral had a poem I haven't found since, "Lillian's Chair," and a poem called "Dog Hospital," by Peter Wild. I tried, as a sort of prickly numbness took over my lower half, to recite the poems in my head. I moved my lips.
"Stop staring at me," he said.
"I'm sorry," I said. "You're strong," I tried.
He liked this. He started humping me again, wildly. The base of my spine was crushed into the ground. Glass cut me on my back and behind. But something still wasn't working for him. I didn't know what he was doing.
He kneeled back. "Raise your legs," he said.
Not knowing what he meant, never having done this for a lover, or read that kind of book, I raised them straight up.
"Spread them."
I did. My legs were like a plastic Barbie's, pale, inflexible. But he wasn't satisfied. He put a hand on each calf and pressed them out farther than I could hold.
"Keep them there," he said.
He tried again. He worked his fist. He grabbed my breasts. He twisted the nipples with his fingers, lapped at them with his tongue.
Tears came out of the corners of my eyes and rolled down either cheek. I was leaving now, but then I heard sounds. Out on the path. People, a group of laughing boys and girls, passing by. I had passed a party on my way to the park, a party to celebrate the last day of school. I looked at him; he did not hear them. This was it. I made an abrupt scream and, as soon as I did, he shoved his hand in my mouth. Simultaneously I heard the laughter again. This time it was directed toward the tunnel, toward us. Yells and taunts. Good-time noises.
We lay there, his hand locked in my mouth and pressing down hard into my throat, until the group of well-wishers left. Moved on. My second chance at escape now gone.
Things weren't going the way he planned. It was taking too long. He ordered me to stand up. Told me I could put on my panties. Used that word. I hated it.
I thought it was over. I was trembling but I thought he'd had enough. Blood was everywhere and so I thought he'd done what he'd come for.
"Give me a blow job," he said. He was standing now. I was on the ground, trying to search among the filth for my clothes.
He kicked me and I curled into a ball.
"I want a blow job." He held his dick in his hand.
"I don't know how," I said.
"What do you mean you don't know how?"
"I've never done it before," I said. "I'm a virgin."
"Put it in your mouth."
I kneeled before him. "Can I put my bra back on?" I wanted my clothes. I saw his thighs before me, the way they belled out from the knee, the thick muscles and small black hairs, and his flaccid dick.
He grabbed my head. "Put it in your mouth and suck," he said.
"Like a straw?" I said.
"Yeah, like a straw."
I took it in my hand. It was small. Hot, clammy. It throbbed involuntarily at my touch. He shoved my head forward and I put it in. It touched my tongue. The taste like dirty rubber or burnt hair. I sucked in hard.
"Not like that," he said and brought my head away. "Don't you know how to suck dick?"
"No, I told you," I said. "I've never done this before."
"Bitch," he said. His penis still limp, he held it with two fingers and peed on me. Just a little bit. Acrid, wet, on my nose and lips. The smell of him -- the fruity, heady, nauseating smell -- clung to my skin.
"Get back on the ground," he said, "and do what I say."
And I did. When he told me to close my eyes I told him I had lost my glasses, couldn't even really see him. "Talk to me," he said. "I believe you, you're a virgin. I'm your first." As he worked against me, trying for more and more friction, I told him he was strong, that he was powerful, that he was a good man. He got hard enough and plunged himself inside me. He ordered me to and I wrapped my legs around his back and he drove me into the ground. I was locked on. All that remained unpossessed was my brain. It looked and watched and cataloged the details of it all. His face, his purpose, how best I could help him.
I heard more party-goers on the path, but I was far away now. He made noises and rammed it in. Rammed it and rammed it and those on the path, those so far away, living in the world where I had lived, could not be reached by me now.
"Nail her, all right!" someone yelled toward the tunnel. It was the kind of fraternity reveler's voice that had made me feel that, as a student at Syracuse University, I might never fit in.
They passed. I was staring right into his eyes. With him.
"You're so strong, you're such a man, thank you, thank you, I wanted this."
And then it was over. He came and slumped into me. I lay under him. My heart beating wildly. My brain thinking of Olga Cabral, of poetry, of my mother, of anything. Then I heard his breathing. Light and regular. He was snoring. I thought: Escape. I shifted under him and he woke.
He looked at me, did not know who I was. Then his remorse began.
"I'm so sorry," he said. "You're a good girl," he said. "I'm so sorry."
"Can I get dressed?"
He moved aside and stood up, raised his pants, zipped them.
"Of course, of course," he said. "I'll help you."
I had begun to let myself shake again.
"You're cold," he said. "Here, put these on." He held my underwear out to me, in the way a mother would for a child, by the sides of it. I was supposed to stand up and step in.
I crawled over toward my clothes. Put my bra on as I sat on the ground.
"Are you okay?" he asked. His tone was amazing to me. Concerned. But I didn't stop to think of it then. All I knew was it was better than it had been.
I stood up and took my underpants from him. I put them on, almost falling for my lack of balance. I had to sit on the ground to put my pants on. I was worried about my legs. I couldn't seem to control them.
He watched me. As I inched my pants up, his tone switched.
"You're going to have a baby, bitch," he said. "What are you going to do about it?"
I realized this could be a reason to kill me. Any evidence. I lied to him.
"Please don't tell anyone," I said. "I'll have an abortion. Please don't tell anyone. My mother would kill me if she knew about this. Please," I said, "no one can know about this. My family would hate me. Please don't talk about this."
He laughed. "All right," he said.
"Thank you," I said. I stood now and put my shirt on. It was inside out.
"Can I go now?" I asked.
"Come here," he said. "Kiss me good-bye." It was a date to him. For me it was happening all over again.
I kissed him. Did I say I had free will? Do you still believe in that?
He apologized again. This time he cried. "I'm so sorry," he said. "You're such a good girl, a good girl, like you said."
I was shocked by his tears, but by now it was just another horrible nuance I couldn't understand. So he wouldn't hurt me more, I needed to say the right thing.
"It's okay," I said. "Really."
"No," he said, "it's not right what I did. You're a good girl. You weren't lying to me. I'm sorry for what I did."
I've always hated it in movies and plays, the woman who is ripped open by violence and then asked to parcel out redemption for the rest of her life.
"I forgive you," I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death.
He perked up. Looked at me. "You're a beautiful girl," he said.
"Can I take my purse?" I asked. I was afraid to move without his permission. "My books?"
He went back to business now. "You said you had eight dollars?" He took it from my jeans. It was wrapped around my license. It was a photo ID. New York State didn't have them yet but Pennsylvania did.
"What is this?" he asked. "Is this one of them meal cards I can use at McDonald's?"
"No," I said. I was petrified of him having my identification. Leaving with anything other than what he had: all of me, except my brain and my belongings. I wanted to leave the tunnel with both of them.
He looked at it a moment longer until he was convinced. He did not take my great-grandmother's sapphire ring, which had been on my hand the whole time. He was not interested in that kind of thing.
He handed me my purse and the books I'd bought that afternoon with my mother.
"Which way you going?" he asked.
I pointed. "All right," he said, "take care of yourself."
I promised that I would. I started walking. Back out over the ground, through the gate to which I'd clung a little over an hour before, and onto the brick path. Going farther into the park was the only way toward home.
A moment later.
"Hey, girl," he yelled at me.
I turned. I was, as I am in these pages, his.
"What's your name?"
I couldn't lie. I didn't have a name other than my own to say. "Alice," I said.
"Nice knowing you, Alice," he yelled. "See you around sometime."
He ran off in the opposite direction, along the chain-link fence of the pool house. I turned. I had done my job. I had convinced him. Now I walked.
I didn't see a soul until I reached the three short stone steps that led from the park to the sidewalk. On the opposite side of the street was a frat house. I kept walking. I remained on the sidewalk close to the park. There were people out on the lawns of the frat house. A kegger party just dying out. At the place where my dorm's street dead-ended into the park, I turned and started to walk downhill past another, larger dormitory.
I was aware I was being stared at. Party-goers coming home or grinds taking in the last bit of sober air before the summer. They talked. But I wasn't there. I heard them outside of me, but like a stroke victim, I was locked inside my body.
They came up to me. Some ran, but then stepped back when I didn't respond.
"Hey, did you see her?" they said to one another.
"She's really fucked up."
"Look at the blood."
I made it down the hill, past those people. I was afraid of everyone. Outside, on the raised platform that surrounded Marion Dorm's front door, were people who knew me. Knew my face if not my name. There were three floors in Marion, a floor of girls between two floors of boys. Outside now it was mostly the boys. One boy opened the outer door for me to let me pass through. Another held the inner one. I was being watched; how could I not have been?
At a small table near the door was the RSA -- resident security assistant. He was a graduate student. A small, studious Arab man. After midnight they checked ID's of anyone trying to get in. He looked at me and then hurriedly stood.
"What has happened?" he asked.
"I don't have my ID," I said.
I stood before him with my face smashed in, cuts across my nose and lip, a tear along my cheek. My hair was matted with leaves. My clothes were inside out and bloodied. My eyes were glazed.
"Are you all right?"
"I want to go to my room," I said. "I don't have my ID," I repeated.
He waved me in. "Promise me," he said, "that you will take care of yourself."
Boys were in the stairwell. Some of the girls too. The whole dorm was still mostly awake. I walked by them. Silence. Eyes.
I walked down the hall and knocked on the door of my best friend Mary Alice's room. No one. I knocked on my own, hoping for my roommate. No one. Last, I knocked on the door of Linda and Diane, two of a group of six of us who had become friends that year. At first there was no answer. Then the doorknob turned.
Inside, the room was dark. Linda was kneeling on her bed and holding the door open. I had woken her up.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Linda," I said, "I was just raped and beaten in the park."
She fell back and into the darkness. She had passed out.
The doors were spring-hinged and so the door slammed shut.
The RSA had cared. I turned around and walked back downstairs to his desk. He stood.
"I was raped in the park," I said. "Will you call the police?"
He spoke quickly in Arabic, forgetting himself, then, "Yes, oh, yes, please come."
Behind him was a room with glass walls. Though meant as an office of some sort, it was never used. He led me in there and told me to sit down. Because there was no chair, I sat on top of the desk.
Boys had gathered from outside and now stared in at me, pressing their faces near the glass.
I don't remember how long it took -- not long because it was university property and the hospital was only six blocks south. The police arrived first, but I have no memory of what I said to them there.
Then I was on a gurney, being strapped down. Then out in the hallway. There was a large crowd now and it blocked the entrance. I saw the RSA look over at me as he was being questioned.
A policeman took control.
"Get out of the way," he said to my curious peers. "This girl's just been raped."
I surfaced long enough to hear those words coming from his lips. I was that girl. The ripple effect began in the halls. The ambulance men carried me down the stairs. The doors of the ambulance were open. Inside, as we charged, sirens screaming, to the hospital, I let myself collapse. I went somewhere deep inside myself, curled up and away from what was happening.
They rushed me through the emergency room doors. Then into an examination room. A policeman came inside as the nurse was helping me take off my clothes and change into a hospital gown. She wasn't happy to have him there, but he averted his eyes and flipped forward to a clean page in his pocket notebook.
I couldn't help but think of detective shows on television. The nurse and policeman argued over me as he began to ask questions, take my clothes for evidence as she swabbed my face and back with alcohol and promised me the doctor would be there soon.
I remember the nurse better than I do him. She used her body as a shield between us. As he gathered preliminary evidence -- my basic account -- she said things to me as she took items for the evidence kit.
"You must have given him a run for his money," she said.
When she took the scraping from under my nails, she said, "Good, you got a piece of him."
The doctor arrived. A female gynecologist named Dr. Husa.
She began to explain what she was going to do while the nurse shooed out the policeman. I lay on the table. She was going to inject me with Demerol in order to relax me enough for her to gather evidence. It might also make me want to pee. I was not to do that, she said, because that might disrupt the culture of my vagina and destroy the evidence the police needed.
The door opened.
"There's someone here who wants to see you," the nurse said.
Somehow, I thought it might be my mother, and I panicked.
"A Mary Alice."
"Alice?" I heard Mary Alice's voice. It was soft, afraid, even.
She took my hand and I squeezed it hard.
Mary Alice was beautiful -- a natural blonde with gorgeous green eyes -- and on that day, particularly, she reminded me of an angel.
Dr. Husa let us talk for a moment as she prepped the area.
Mary Alice, like everyone else, had been drinking heavily at a year-end bash held at a nearby fraternity house.
"Don't say I can't sober you up," I said to her, and for the first time I cried too, letting the tears leak out as she gave me what I needed most, a small smile to acknowledge my joke. It was the first thing from my old life that I recognized on the other side. It was horribly changed and marked, my friend's smile. It was not free and open, born of the silliness our smiles had been all year, but it was a comfort to me. She cried more than I did and her face became mottled and swollen. She told me how Diane, who, like Mary Alice, was five ten, had practically lifted up the small RSA in order to get my whereabouts out of him.
"He wasn't going to tell anyone but your roommate, but Nancy was up in your room, passed out."
I smiled at the idea of Diane and Mary Alice lifting up the RSA, his feet doing a wild walk in the air like a Keystone Kop.
"We're ready," Dr. Husa said.
"Will you stay with me?" I asked Mary Alice.
She did.
Dr. Husa and the nurse worked together. Every so often they needed to massage my thighs. I asked them to explain everything they did. I wanted to know everything.
"This is different from a regular exam," Dr. Husa explained. "I need to take samples in order to make up a rape kit."
"That's evidence so you can get this creep," the nurse said.
They took pubic clippings and pubic combings and samples of blood and semen and vaginal discharge. When I would wince, Mary Alice squeezed my hand harder. The nurse tried to make conversation, asked Mary Alice what she majored in up at the school, told me I was lucky to have such a good friend, said that being beaten up like I had would make the cops listen to me more attentively.
"There is so much blood," I heard Husa say worriedly to the nurse.
As they did the combings, Dr. Husa said, "Ah, now, there is a hair from him!" The nurse held the evidence bag open and Dr. Husa shook the combings into it.
"Good," the nurse said.
"Alice," Dr. Husa said, "we are going to let you urinate now but then I will have to take stitches inside."
The nurse helped me sit up and then scooted a bedpan under me. I urinated for such a long time that the nurse and Mary Alice made a point of it, and laughed each time they thought I'd stopped. When I was done, what I saw was a bedpan full of blood, not urine. The nurse covered it quickly with paper from the examining table.
"You don't need to be looking at that."
Mary Alice helped me lie back down.
Dr. Husa had me scoot down so she could take the stitches.
"You'll be sore down here for a few days, maybe a week," Dr. Husa said. "You shouldn't do much, if you can avoid it."
But I couldn't think in terms of days or weeks. I could only focus on the next minute and believe that with each minute it would get better, that slowly all of this might go away.
I told the police not to call my mother. Unaware of my appearance, I believed I could hide the rape from her and from my family. My mother had panic attacks in heavy traffic; I was certain my rape would destroy her.
After the vaginal exam was completed, I was wheeled into a bright white room. This room was used to store large, incredible machines with lifesaving abilities, all shining with stainless steel and spotless fiberglass. Mary Alice had gone back out to the waiting room. I noticed the machines and their details, how clean and new they seemed, because it was the first time I had been alone since the wheels of my rescue were set in motion. I lay on the gurney, naked under the hospital gown, and I was cold. I was not sure why I was there, stored alongside these machines. It was a long time before anyone came.
It was a nurse. I asked her if I could take a shower in the shower stall in the corner. She looked at a chart on the end of the gurney, which I hadn't known was there. I wondered what it said about me, and pictured the word RAPE, in bold red letters, written diagonally across the page.
I lay still and took shallow breaths. The Demerol worked hard to relax me but, still dirty, I fought back. Every inch of my skin prickled and burned. I wanted him off of me. I wanted to shower and scrub my skin raw.
The nurse told me I was waiting for the psychiatrist on call. Then she left the room. It was only fifteen minutes -- but with the buggy crawl of contamination spreading over me, it felt very long -- when a harried psychiatrist entered the room.
I thought, even then, that this doctor needed the Valium he prescribed for me more than I did. He was exhausted. I remember telling him I knew about Valium and so he didn't need to explain.
"It will make you calm," he said.
My mother had been addicted to it when I was little. She had lectured me and my sister on drugs and as I grew older I understood her fear -- that I would get drunk or high and lose my virginity to some fumbling boy. But in these lectures what I always pictured was my vibrant mother diminished somehow, lessened -- as if a gauze had been thrown over her sharp edges.
I couldn't see Valium as the benign drug the doctor made it out to be. I told him this but he pooh-poohed it. When he left the room I did what I knew I would do almost immediately, and crumpled up the prescription to throw it into the waste bin. It felt good to do it. A sort of "fuck you" to the idea that anyone could sweep this thing I'd suffered under the carpet. Even then I thought I knew what could happen if I let people take care of me. I would disappear from view. I wouldn't be Alice anymore, whatever that was.
A nurse came in and told me she could send in another one of my friends to help me. With the painkillers I would need a nurse or someone else to help me keep my balance in the shower. I wanted Mary Alice, but I didn't want to be mean, so I asked for Tree, Mary Alice's roommate and one of our group of six.
I waited and as I did, I tried to think of what I could tell my mother -- some kind of story that would explain why I was so sleepy. I could not know, despite the doctor's warnings, how sore I would be in the morning, or that an elegant latticework of bruises would appear along my thighs and chest, on the undersides of my upper arms and around my neck, where, days later, at home in my bedroom, I would begin to make out the individual pressure points of his fingertips on my throat -- a butterfly of the rapist's two thumbs interlocking in the center and his fingers fluttering out and around my neck. "I'm gonna kill you, bitch. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up." Each repetition punctuated by the smash of my skull against brick, each repetition cutting off, tighter and tighter, the airflow to my brain.
Tree's face, and her gasp, should have told me that I couldn't hide the truth. But she recovered herself quickly and helped me navigate over to the shower stall. She was uncomfortable around me; I was no longer like her but was other than.
I think the way I survived in the early hours after the rape was by spiraling the obsession of how not to tell my mother over and over again in my brain. Convinced it would destroy her, I ceased thinking of what had happened to me and worried about her instead. My worry for her became my life raft. I clung to it, coming in and out of consciousness on my way to the hospital, during the internal stitches of the pelvic exam, and while the psychiatrist gave me the prescription for the very pills that had once made my mother numb.
The shower was in the corner of the room. I walked like a wobbly old lady and Tree steadied me. I was concentrating on my balance and so did not see the mirror to my right until I looked up and I was almost right in front of it.
"Alice, don't," Tree said.
But I was fascinated, the way I had been as a child when, in a special room with low light, I saw an exhibit at the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archaeology. It was nicknamed Blue Baby and it was a mummy, with the disintegrated face and body of a child who had died centuries ago. I recognized something alike in it -- I was a child as this Blue Baby had been a child.
I saw my face in the mirror. I reached my hand up to touch the marks and cuts. That was me. It was also an undeniable truth: No shower would wipe the traces of the rape away. I had no choice but to tell my mother. She was too savvy to believe any story I could now fashion. She worked for a newspaper, and she took pride in the fact that it was impossible to pull the wool over her eyes.
The shower was small and made of white tile. I asked Tree to turn on the water. "As hot as you can," I said.
I took off the hospital gown and handed it to her.
I had to grip the tap and a handle on the side of the shower to stay upright. This left me unable to scrub myself. I remember telling Tree I wished I had a wire brush but that even that wouldn't be enough.
She drew the curtain and I stood there, letting the water beat over me.
"Can you help me?" I asked.
Tree pulled the curtain back a few inches.
"What do you want me to do?"
"I'm afraid I'll fall down. Can you take the soap and help wash me?"
She reached through the water and got the large square brick of soap. She drew it down my back, nothing but the bar of soap touching me. I felt the rapist's words, "worst bitch," as I would feel them almost constantly for years when I undressed in front of other people.
"Forget it," I said, unable to look at her. "I'll do it myself. Just put the soap back."
She did, then pulled the curtain closed, before leaving.
I sat down in the shower. I took a washcloth and lathered it up. I scrubbed hard with the rough towel, under a tap so hot my skin had already turned beet red. The last thing I did was put the towel over my face and with both hands rubbed it back and forth over and over again until the cuts and their blood turned the small white towel pink.
After the hot shower, I dressed in clothes that Tree and Diane had hurriedly selected from the few clean clothes I had. They had forgotten any underwear so I had no bra or underpants. What I did have was a pair of old jeans that I had embroidered flowers on while still in high school and then, when the knees ripped open, had sewn intricate handmade patches on -- long strips of pleated paisley and deep-green velvet. My grandmother had labeled them my "rebel" pants. On top, I wore a thin white-and-red-striped blouse. I left the shirttails out, hoping to hide as much as possible of the jeans.
The heat of the shower and the Demerol worked together to make me groggy during the drive to the police station. I remember seeing the resident advisor, a sophomore named Cindy, outside the security door on the third floor of the police station, called the Public Safety Building. I wasn't prepared to see anyone with such a bright face, such an all-American-coed presence.
Mary Alice stayed outside with Cindy as police officers led me through a security door. I met a plainclothes detective inside. He was short, with longish black hair. He reminded me of Starsky from Starsky and Hutch, and seemed different from the other policemen. He was nice to me but his shift was ending. He assigned me to Sergeant Lorenz, who had not yet arrived at the station.
In hindsight I can only imagine how I appeared to them. My face was swollen, my hair wet, my clothes -- the "rebel" pants especially and the lack of a bra -- and on top of this, the Demerol.
I made a composite from microfilm features. I worked with an officer and was frustrated because none of my rapist's features seemed to be among the fifty or so noses, eyes, and lips. I gave exact descriptions but when nothing was acceptable to me among the tiny black-and-white features I could select, the policeman decided on what was best. The composite that went out that night looked little like him.
The police then took a series of pictures of me, never knowing another series had been taken earlier that night. Ken Childs, a boy I liked, had shot almost a whole roll of film, snapping candids of me in various poses throughout his apartment.
Ken had a crush on me, and I knew that he was taking the pictures to show to people at home over the summer. I knew the photos would be judged. Was I pretty? Did I look smart? Would his friends be reduced to "She seems nice"? Or, worse still, "That's a nice sweater she's wearing"?
I had gained weight, but the jeans I wore were still too big for me, and I'd borrowed my mother's white oxford-cloth shirt and a tan cable cardigan sweater. The word that comes to mind here is frumpy.
So, in the "before" photos taken by Ken Childs, I am at first posing, then giggling, then laughing openly. For all my self-consciousness, I also got lost in the giggling silliness of our crush. I balance a box of raisins on my head, I stare at the writing on the back as if it were a gripping text, I prop my feet up on the edge of his dining table. I smile, smile, smile.
In the "after" photos the police took, I stand shocked. The word shock, in this context, is meant to mean I was no longer there. If you have seen police photos of crime victims, you will know that they appear either bleached or unusually dark. Mine were of the overexposed variety. There were four types of poses. Face. Face and neck. Neck. Standing with identity number. No one tells you at the time how important these photos will be. The cosmetics of rape are central to proving any case. So far, in appearance, I was two for two: I wore loose, unenticing clothes; I had clearly been beaten. Add this to my virginity, and you will begin to understand much of what matters inside the courtroom.
Finally, I was allowed to leave the Public Safety Building with Cindy, Mary Alice, and Tree. I told the officers in the station that I would return in a few hours and could be counted on to give an affidavit and look through mug shots. I wanted them to see I was serious, I wouldn't let them down. But they were working the night shift. Even when I did come back -- and in their minds, it was far from certain that I would -- they wouldn't be there to see I'd kept my word.
The police drove us back to Marion Dorm. It was early in the morning. Light had begun to creep up over Thorden Park at the top of the hill. I had to tell my mother.
The dorm was deathly quiet. Cindy went into her room at the top of the hall and Mary Alice and I agreed we would meet her there momentarily. Neither of us had a private phone.
We went to my room, where I found a bra and underwear to put on under my clothes.
Back out in the hallway, we ran into Diane and her boyfriend, Victor. They had been up all night, waiting for me to come home.
My relationship to Victor, before that morning, consisted primarily of not understanding what he had in common with Diane, whom I found loud. He was handsome and athletic and very, very quiet around all of us. He had entered school already having chosen his major. It was something like electrical engineering. Very different from poetry. Victor was black.
"Alice," Diane said.
Other people came out of Cindy's open doorway. Girls I knew vaguely or those I didn't know.
"Victor wants to hug you," Diane said.
I looked at Victor. This was too much. He was not my rapist, I knew that. That was not the issue. But he was blocking my way to the last thing on earth I wanted to do and the thing I knew I had to do. Make that call to my mother.
"I don't think I can," I said to Victor.
"He was black, wasn't he?" Victor asked. He was trying to get me to look at him, look right at him.
"Yes."
"I'm sorry," he said. He was crying. The tears ran slowly down the outside of his cheeks. "I'm so sorry."
I don't know whether I hugged him because I could not stand to see him crying (so odd in the Victor I knew, the quiet Victor who studied diligently or smiled shyly at Diane), or because I was prompted further by those around us. He held me until I had to pull away and then he let me go. He was miserable, and I cannot even now imagine what was going on inside his head. Perhaps he already knew that both relatives and strangers would say things to me like "I bet he was black," and so he wanted to give me something to counter this, some experience in the same twenty-four hours that would make me resist placing people in categories and aiming at them my full-on hate. It was my first hug from a man after the rape -- black or white -- and all I knew was that I couldn't give anything back. The arms around me, the vague threat of physical power, were all too much.
By the end, Victor and I had an audience. It was something I would have to get used to. Standing close to him, but separated from the embrace, I was aware of Mary Alice and of Diane. They belonged. The others were foggy and off to the side. They were watching my life as if it were a movie. In their version of the story, where did they fit? I would find out over the years that in a few versions, I was their best friend. Knowing a victim is like knowing a celebrity. Particularly when the crime is clouded in taboo. When I was doing research for this book, back in Syracuse, I met a woman like this. Without recognizing me at first, only knowing I was writing a book on Alice Sebold's rape case, she hurried in from another room and told me and those assisting me that "the victim in that case was my best friend." I had no idea who she was. When someone referred to me by name, she blinked and then came forward, embracing me to save face.
In Cindy's room, I sat down on the bed closest to the door. Cindy, Mary Alice, and Tree were there, perhaps Diane. Cindy had shooed the others out and shut her door.
It was time. I sat with the phone in my lap. My mother was only a few miles away, having driven up the day before to take me home from Syracuse. She would be up and puttering around her hotel room at the Holiday Inn. At that time she traveled with her own coffeemaker because she made decaf in her room. She was coming down from as much as ten cups of coffee a day, and restaurants weren't yet in the custom of serving decaf.
Before she had dropped me off at Ken Childs's house the evening before, we had agreed she would come to the dorm around 8:30 a.m. -- a late start for her but a concession to the fact that I would have been up late saying good-bye to friends. I looked around at my girlfriends, hoping they would say, "You don't look so bad," or provide me with the single and perfect story to explain the cuts and bruises on my face -- the story that I hadn't been able to come up with during the night.
Tree dialed the phone.
When my mother picked up, Tree said, "Mrs. Sebold, this is a friend of Alice's, Tree Roebeck."
Maybe my mother said hello.
"I'm going to put Alice on the phone now. She needs to speak with you."
Tree handed me the phone.
"Mom," I started.
She must not have heard what I thought was the obvious quaver in my voice. She was irritated.
"What is it, Alice? You know I'm due over soon; can't it wait?"
"Mom, I need to tell you something."
She heard it now. "What, what is it?"
I said it as if I were reading a line from a script.
"Last night I was beaten and raped in the park."
My mother said, "Oh, my God," and then, after a quick inhalation of breath, a startled gasp, she reeled herself in. "Are you all right?"
"Can you come get me, Mommy?" I asked.
She said it would be twenty minutes or so, she had to pack up and check out, but she would be there.
I hung up the phone.
Mary Alice suggested that we wait in her room until my mother arrived. Someone had bought bagels or doughnuts.
In the time since our arrival back at the dorm, students had woken up. There was hurry all around me. Many students, including my friends, were meeting parents for breakfast or rushing to bus stations and airports. People would attend to me and then switch off to finish packing. I sat with my back against the cinder-block dorm wall. As people came in and out and the door opened, I could hear bits of conversation.
"Where is she?" "Raped..." "...see her face?" "...she know him?" "...always weird..."
I had not eaten anything since the night before -- since the raisins at Ken Childs's house -- and I could not look at the bagels or doughnuts without feeling what -- the rapist's penis -- had last been in my mouth. I tried to stay awake. I had been up for more than twenty-four hours -- far longer, what with the all-nighters that I'd pulled during finals week -- but I was afraid to fall asleep before my mother got there. My girlfriends and the resident advisor, who, after all, was only nineteen, tried to take care of me, but I had begun to notice that I was now on the other side of something they could not understand. I didn't understand it myself.
Copyright © 1999 by Alice Sebold
This is what I remember. My lips were cut. I bit down on them when he grabbed me from behind and covered my mouth. He said these words: "I'll kill you if you scream." I remained motionless. "Do you understand? If you scream you're dead." I nodded my head. My arms were pinned to my sides by his right arm wrapped around me and my mouth was covered with his left.
He released his hand from my mouth.
I screamed. Quickly. Abruptly.
The struggle began.
He covered my mouth again. He kneed me in the back of my legs so that I would fall down. "You don't get it, bitch. I'll kill you. I've got a knife. I'll kill you." He released his grip on my mouth again and I fell, screaming, on the brick path. He straddled me and kicked me in the side. I made sounds, they were nothing, they were soft footfalls. They urged him on, they made him righteous. I scrambled on the path. I was wearing soft-soled moccasins with which I tried to land wild kicks. Everything missed or merely grazed him. I had never fought before, was chosen last in gym.
Somehow, I don't remember how, I made it back on my feet. I remember biting him, pushing him, I don't know what. Then I began to run. Like a giant who is all powerful, he reached out and grabbed the end of my long brown hair. He yanked it hard and brought me down onto my knees in front of him. That was my first missed escape, the hair, the woman's long hair.
"You asked for it now," he said, and I began to beg.
He reached around to his back pocket to draw out a knife. I struggled still, my hair coming out painfully from my skull as I did my best to rip myself free of his grip. I lunged forward and grabbed his left leg with both arms, throwing him off balance and making him stagger. I would not know it until the police found it later in the grass, a few feet away from my broken glasses, but with that move, the knife fell from his hands and was lost.
Then it was fists.
Maybe he was angry at the loss of his weapon or at my disobedience. Whatever the reason, this marked the end of the preliminaries. I was on the ground on my stomach. He sat on my back. He pounded my skull into the brick. He cursed me. He turned me around and sat on my chest. I was babbling. I was begging. Here is where he wrapped his hands around my neck and began to squeeze. For a second, I lost consciousness. When I came to, I knew I was staring up into the eyes of the man who would kill me.
At that moment I signed myself over to him. I was convinced that I would not live. I could not fight anymore. He was going to do what he wanted to me. That was it.
Everything slowed down. He stood up and began dragging me over the grass by my hair. I twisted and half crawled, trying to keep up with him. Dimly, I had seen the dark entrance of the amphitheater tunnel from the path. As we neared it, and I realized it was our destination, a rush of fear ran through me. I knew I would die.
There was an old iron fence a few feet out from the tunnel entrance. It was three feet high and provided a narrow space through which you had to walk in order to enter the tunnel. As he dragged me, as I scrambled against the grass, I caught sight of that fence and became utterly convinced that if he brought me beyond this point, I would not survive.
For a moment, as he dragged me across the ground, I clung feebly to the bottom of that iron fence, before a rough pull yanked me clean. People think a woman stops fighting when she is physically exhausted, but I was about to begin my real fight, a fight of words and lies and the brain.
When people talk about climbing a mountain or riding rough water, they say they became one with it, their bodies so attuned to it that they often, when asked to articulate how they did it, cannot fully explain.
Inside the tunnel, where broken beer bottles, old leaves, and other, as yet indiscriminate, things littered the ground, I became one with this man. He held my life in his hand. Those who say they would rather fight to the death than be raped are fools. I would rather be raped a thousand times. You do what you have to.
"Stand up," he said.
I did.
I was shivering uncontrollably. It was cold out and the cold combined with the fear, with the exhaustion, made me shake from head to toe.
He dumped my purse and bag of books in the corner of the sealed-off tunnel.
"Take off your clothes."
"I have eight dollars in my back pocket," I said. "My mother has credit cards. My sister does too."
"I don't want your money," he said, and laughed.
I looked at him. Into his eyes now, as if he was a human being, as if I could speak to him.
"Please don't rape me," I said.
"Take off your clothes."
"I'm a virgin," I said.
He didn't believe me. Repeated his command. "Take off your clothes."
My hands were shaking and I couldn't control them. He pulled me forward by my belt until my body was up against his, which was up against the tunnel's back wall.
"Kiss me," he said.
And he drew my head forward and our lips met. My lips were pursed tightly together. He tugged harder on my belt, my body pressing up further against his. He grabbed my hair in his fist and balled it up. He drew my head back and looked at me. I began to cry, to plead.
"Please don't," I said. "Please."
"Shut up."
He kissed me again and this time, he inserted his tongue in my mouth. By pleading, I had left myself open to this. Again he pulled my head back roughly. "Kiss back," he said.
And I did.
When he was satisfied, he stopped and tried to work the latch on my belt. It was a belt with a strange buckle and he couldn't figure it out. To have him let go of me, for him to leave me alone, I said, "Let me, I'll do it."
He watched me.
When I was done, he unzipped the jeans I wore.
"Now take off your shirt."
I had a cardigan sweater on. I took that off. He reached over to help unbutton my shirt. He fumbled.
"I'll do it," I said again.
I unbuttoned the oxford-cloth shirt and, like the cardigan, I peeled it back from my body. It was like shedding feathers. Or wings.
"Now the bra."
I did.
He reached out and grabbed them -- my breasts -- in his two hands. He plied them and squeezed them, manipulating them right down to my ribs. Twisting. I hope that to say this hurt isn't necessary here.
"Please don't do this, please," I said.
"Nice white titties," he said. And the words made me give them up, lobbing off each part of my body as he claimed ownership -- the mouth, the tongue, my breasts.
"I'm cold," I said.
"Lay down."
"On the ground?" I asked, stupidly, hopelessly. I saw, among the leaves and glass, the grave. My body stretched out, disassembled, gagged, dead.
I sat first, kind of stumbled into a seated position. He took the end of my pants and tugged. As I tried to hide my nakedness -- at least I had my underpants on -- he looked down at my body. I still feel that in that gaze his eyes lit up my sickly pale skin in that dark tunnel. Made it all -- my flesh -- suddenly horrible. Ugly too kind a word, but the closest one.
"You're the worst bitch I ever done this to," he said. It was said in disgust, it was said in analysis. He saw what he had bagged and didn't like his catch.
No matter, he would finish.
Here, I began to combine truth with fiction, using anything to try and get him to come over to my side. To see me as pitiful, for him to see me as worse off than him.
"I'm a foster child," I said. "I don't even know who my parents are. Please don't do this. I'm a virgin," I said.
"Lie down."
I did. Shaking, I crawled over and lay face up against the cold ground. He pulled my underpants off me roughly and bundled them into his hand. He threw them away from me and into a corner where I lost sight of them.
I watched him as he unzipped his pants and let them fall around his ankles.
He lay down on top of me and started humping. I was familiar with this. This was what Steve, a boy I liked in high school, had done against my leg, because I would not let him do what he wanted most, which was to make love to me. With Steve I was fully dressed and so was he. He went home frustrated and I felt safe. My parents were upstairs the whole time. I told myself Steve loved me.
He worked away on me, reaching down to work with his penis.
I stared right into his eyes. I was too afraid not to. If I shut my eyes, I believed, I would disappear. To make it through, I had to be present the whole time.
He called me bitch. He told me I was dry.
"I'm sorry," I said -- I never stopped apologizing. "I'm a virgin," I said.
"Stop looking at me," he said. "Shut your eyes. Stop shaking."
"I can't."
"Stop it or you'll be sorry."
I did. My focus became acute. I stared harder than ever at him. He began to knead his fist against the opening of my vagina. Inserted his fingers into it, three or four at a time. Something tore. I began to bleed there. I was wet now.
It made him excited. He was intrigued. As he worked his whole fist up into my vagina and pumped it, I went into my brain. Waiting there were poems for me, poems I'd learned in class: Olga Cabral had a poem I haven't found since, "Lillian's Chair," and a poem called "Dog Hospital," by Peter Wild. I tried, as a sort of prickly numbness took over my lower half, to recite the poems in my head. I moved my lips.
"Stop staring at me," he said.
"I'm sorry," I said. "You're strong," I tried.
He liked this. He started humping me again, wildly. The base of my spine was crushed into the ground. Glass cut me on my back and behind. But something still wasn't working for him. I didn't know what he was doing.
He kneeled back. "Raise your legs," he said.
Not knowing what he meant, never having done this for a lover, or read that kind of book, I raised them straight up.
"Spread them."
I did. My legs were like a plastic Barbie's, pale, inflexible. But he wasn't satisfied. He put a hand on each calf and pressed them out farther than I could hold.
"Keep them there," he said.
He tried again. He worked his fist. He grabbed my breasts. He twisted the nipples with his fingers, lapped at them with his tongue.
Tears came out of the corners of my eyes and rolled down either cheek. I was leaving now, but then I heard sounds. Out on the path. People, a group of laughing boys and girls, passing by. I had passed a party on my way to the park, a party to celebrate the last day of school. I looked at him; he did not hear them. This was it. I made an abrupt scream and, as soon as I did, he shoved his hand in my mouth. Simultaneously I heard the laughter again. This time it was directed toward the tunnel, toward us. Yells and taunts. Good-time noises.
We lay there, his hand locked in my mouth and pressing down hard into my throat, until the group of well-wishers left. Moved on. My second chance at escape now gone.
Things weren't going the way he planned. It was taking too long. He ordered me to stand up. Told me I could put on my panties. Used that word. I hated it.
I thought it was over. I was trembling but I thought he'd had enough. Blood was everywhere and so I thought he'd done what he'd come for.
"Give me a blow job," he said. He was standing now. I was on the ground, trying to search among the filth for my clothes.
He kicked me and I curled into a ball.
"I want a blow job." He held his dick in his hand.
"I don't know how," I said.
"What do you mean you don't know how?"
"I've never done it before," I said. "I'm a virgin."
"Put it in your mouth."
I kneeled before him. "Can I put my bra back on?" I wanted my clothes. I saw his thighs before me, the way they belled out from the knee, the thick muscles and small black hairs, and his flaccid dick.
He grabbed my head. "Put it in your mouth and suck," he said.
"Like a straw?" I said.
"Yeah, like a straw."
I took it in my hand. It was small. Hot, clammy. It throbbed involuntarily at my touch. He shoved my head forward and I put it in. It touched my tongue. The taste like dirty rubber or burnt hair. I sucked in hard.
"Not like that," he said and brought my head away. "Don't you know how to suck dick?"
"No, I told you," I said. "I've never done this before."
"Bitch," he said. His penis still limp, he held it with two fingers and peed on me. Just a little bit. Acrid, wet, on my nose and lips. The smell of him -- the fruity, heady, nauseating smell -- clung to my skin.
"Get back on the ground," he said, "and do what I say."
And I did. When he told me to close my eyes I told him I had lost my glasses, couldn't even really see him. "Talk to me," he said. "I believe you, you're a virgin. I'm your first." As he worked against me, trying for more and more friction, I told him he was strong, that he was powerful, that he was a good man. He got hard enough and plunged himself inside me. He ordered me to and I wrapped my legs around his back and he drove me into the ground. I was locked on. All that remained unpossessed was my brain. It looked and watched and cataloged the details of it all. His face, his purpose, how best I could help him.
I heard more party-goers on the path, but I was far away now. He made noises and rammed it in. Rammed it and rammed it and those on the path, those so far away, living in the world where I had lived, could not be reached by me now.
"Nail her, all right!" someone yelled toward the tunnel. It was the kind of fraternity reveler's voice that had made me feel that, as a student at Syracuse University, I might never fit in.
They passed. I was staring right into his eyes. With him.
"You're so strong, you're such a man, thank you, thank you, I wanted this."
And then it was over. He came and slumped into me. I lay under him. My heart beating wildly. My brain thinking of Olga Cabral, of poetry, of my mother, of anything. Then I heard his breathing. Light and regular. He was snoring. I thought: Escape. I shifted under him and he woke.
He looked at me, did not know who I was. Then his remorse began.
"I'm so sorry," he said. "You're a good girl," he said. "I'm so sorry."
"Can I get dressed?"
He moved aside and stood up, raised his pants, zipped them.
"Of course, of course," he said. "I'll help you."
I had begun to let myself shake again.
"You're cold," he said. "Here, put these on." He held my underwear out to me, in the way a mother would for a child, by the sides of it. I was supposed to stand up and step in.
I crawled over toward my clothes. Put my bra on as I sat on the ground.
"Are you okay?" he asked. His tone was amazing to me. Concerned. But I didn't stop to think of it then. All I knew was it was better than it had been.
I stood up and took my underpants from him. I put them on, almost falling for my lack of balance. I had to sit on the ground to put my pants on. I was worried about my legs. I couldn't seem to control them.
He watched me. As I inched my pants up, his tone switched.
"You're going to have a baby, bitch," he said. "What are you going to do about it?"
I realized this could be a reason to kill me. Any evidence. I lied to him.
"Please don't tell anyone," I said. "I'll have an abortion. Please don't tell anyone. My mother would kill me if she knew about this. Please," I said, "no one can know about this. My family would hate me. Please don't talk about this."
He laughed. "All right," he said.
"Thank you," I said. I stood now and put my shirt on. It was inside out.
"Can I go now?" I asked.
"Come here," he said. "Kiss me good-bye." It was a date to him. For me it was happening all over again.
I kissed him. Did I say I had free will? Do you still believe in that?
He apologized again. This time he cried. "I'm so sorry," he said. "You're such a good girl, a good girl, like you said."
I was shocked by his tears, but by now it was just another horrible nuance I couldn't understand. So he wouldn't hurt me more, I needed to say the right thing.
"It's okay," I said. "Really."
"No," he said, "it's not right what I did. You're a good girl. You weren't lying to me. I'm sorry for what I did."
I've always hated it in movies and plays, the woman who is ripped open by violence and then asked to parcel out redemption for the rest of her life.
"I forgive you," I said. I said what I had to. I would die by pieces to save myself from real death.
He perked up. Looked at me. "You're a beautiful girl," he said.
"Can I take my purse?" I asked. I was afraid to move without his permission. "My books?"
He went back to business now. "You said you had eight dollars?" He took it from my jeans. It was wrapped around my license. It was a photo ID. New York State didn't have them yet but Pennsylvania did.
"What is this?" he asked. "Is this one of them meal cards I can use at McDonald's?"
"No," I said. I was petrified of him having my identification. Leaving with anything other than what he had: all of me, except my brain and my belongings. I wanted to leave the tunnel with both of them.
He looked at it a moment longer until he was convinced. He did not take my great-grandmother's sapphire ring, which had been on my hand the whole time. He was not interested in that kind of thing.
He handed me my purse and the books I'd bought that afternoon with my mother.
"Which way you going?" he asked.
I pointed. "All right," he said, "take care of yourself."
I promised that I would. I started walking. Back out over the ground, through the gate to which I'd clung a little over an hour before, and onto the brick path. Going farther into the park was the only way toward home.
A moment later.
"Hey, girl," he yelled at me.
I turned. I was, as I am in these pages, his.
"What's your name?"
I couldn't lie. I didn't have a name other than my own to say. "Alice," I said.
"Nice knowing you, Alice," he yelled. "See you around sometime."
He ran off in the opposite direction, along the chain-link fence of the pool house. I turned. I had done my job. I had convinced him. Now I walked.
I didn't see a soul until I reached the three short stone steps that led from the park to the sidewalk. On the opposite side of the street was a frat house. I kept walking. I remained on the sidewalk close to the park. There were people out on the lawns of the frat house. A kegger party just dying out. At the place where my dorm's street dead-ended into the park, I turned and started to walk downhill past another, larger dormitory.
I was aware I was being stared at. Party-goers coming home or grinds taking in the last bit of sober air before the summer. They talked. But I wasn't there. I heard them outside of me, but like a stroke victim, I was locked inside my body.
They came up to me. Some ran, but then stepped back when I didn't respond.
"Hey, did you see her?" they said to one another.
"She's really fucked up."
"Look at the blood."
I made it down the hill, past those people. I was afraid of everyone. Outside, on the raised platform that surrounded Marion Dorm's front door, were people who knew me. Knew my face if not my name. There were three floors in Marion, a floor of girls between two floors of boys. Outside now it was mostly the boys. One boy opened the outer door for me to let me pass through. Another held the inner one. I was being watched; how could I not have been?
At a small table near the door was the RSA -- resident security assistant. He was a graduate student. A small, studious Arab man. After midnight they checked ID's of anyone trying to get in. He looked at me and then hurriedly stood.
"What has happened?" he asked.
"I don't have my ID," I said.
I stood before him with my face smashed in, cuts across my nose and lip, a tear along my cheek. My hair was matted with leaves. My clothes were inside out and bloodied. My eyes were glazed.
"Are you all right?"
"I want to go to my room," I said. "I don't have my ID," I repeated.
He waved me in. "Promise me," he said, "that you will take care of yourself."
Boys were in the stairwell. Some of the girls too. The whole dorm was still mostly awake. I walked by them. Silence. Eyes.
I walked down the hall and knocked on the door of my best friend Mary Alice's room. No one. I knocked on my own, hoping for my roommate. No one. Last, I knocked on the door of Linda and Diane, two of a group of six of us who had become friends that year. At first there was no answer. Then the doorknob turned.
Inside, the room was dark. Linda was kneeling on her bed and holding the door open. I had woken her up.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Linda," I said, "I was just raped and beaten in the park."
She fell back and into the darkness. She had passed out.
The doors were spring-hinged and so the door slammed shut.
The RSA had cared. I turned around and walked back downstairs to his desk. He stood.
"I was raped in the park," I said. "Will you call the police?"
He spoke quickly in Arabic, forgetting himself, then, "Yes, oh, yes, please come."
Behind him was a room with glass walls. Though meant as an office of some sort, it was never used. He led me in there and told me to sit down. Because there was no chair, I sat on top of the desk.
Boys had gathered from outside and now stared in at me, pressing their faces near the glass.
I don't remember how long it took -- not long because it was university property and the hospital was only six blocks south. The police arrived first, but I have no memory of what I said to them there.
Then I was on a gurney, being strapped down. Then out in the hallway. There was a large crowd now and it blocked the entrance. I saw the RSA look over at me as he was being questioned.
A policeman took control.
"Get out of the way," he said to my curious peers. "This girl's just been raped."
I surfaced long enough to hear those words coming from his lips. I was that girl. The ripple effect began in the halls. The ambulance men carried me down the stairs. The doors of the ambulance were open. Inside, as we charged, sirens screaming, to the hospital, I let myself collapse. I went somewhere deep inside myself, curled up and away from what was happening.
They rushed me through the emergency room doors. Then into an examination room. A policeman came inside as the nurse was helping me take off my clothes and change into a hospital gown. She wasn't happy to have him there, but he averted his eyes and flipped forward to a clean page in his pocket notebook.
I couldn't help but think of detective shows on television. The nurse and policeman argued over me as he began to ask questions, take my clothes for evidence as she swabbed my face and back with alcohol and promised me the doctor would be there soon.
I remember the nurse better than I do him. She used her body as a shield between us. As he gathered preliminary evidence -- my basic account -- she said things to me as she took items for the evidence kit.
"You must have given him a run for his money," she said.
When she took the scraping from under my nails, she said, "Good, you got a piece of him."
The doctor arrived. A female gynecologist named Dr. Husa.
She began to explain what she was going to do while the nurse shooed out the policeman. I lay on the table. She was going to inject me with Demerol in order to relax me enough for her to gather evidence. It might also make me want to pee. I was not to do that, she said, because that might disrupt the culture of my vagina and destroy the evidence the police needed.
The door opened.
"There's someone here who wants to see you," the nurse said.
Somehow, I thought it might be my mother, and I panicked.
"A Mary Alice."
"Alice?" I heard Mary Alice's voice. It was soft, afraid, even.
She took my hand and I squeezed it hard.
Mary Alice was beautiful -- a natural blonde with gorgeous green eyes -- and on that day, particularly, she reminded me of an angel.
Dr. Husa let us talk for a moment as she prepped the area.
Mary Alice, like everyone else, had been drinking heavily at a year-end bash held at a nearby fraternity house.
"Don't say I can't sober you up," I said to her, and for the first time I cried too, letting the tears leak out as she gave me what I needed most, a small smile to acknowledge my joke. It was the first thing from my old life that I recognized on the other side. It was horribly changed and marked, my friend's smile. It was not free and open, born of the silliness our smiles had been all year, but it was a comfort to me. She cried more than I did and her face became mottled and swollen. She told me how Diane, who, like Mary Alice, was five ten, had practically lifted up the small RSA in order to get my whereabouts out of him.
"He wasn't going to tell anyone but your roommate, but Nancy was up in your room, passed out."
I smiled at the idea of Diane and Mary Alice lifting up the RSA, his feet doing a wild walk in the air like a Keystone Kop.
"We're ready," Dr. Husa said.
"Will you stay with me?" I asked Mary Alice.
She did.
Dr. Husa and the nurse worked together. Every so often they needed to massage my thighs. I asked them to explain everything they did. I wanted to know everything.
"This is different from a regular exam," Dr. Husa explained. "I need to take samples in order to make up a rape kit."
"That's evidence so you can get this creep," the nurse said.
They took pubic clippings and pubic combings and samples of blood and semen and vaginal discharge. When I would wince, Mary Alice squeezed my hand harder. The nurse tried to make conversation, asked Mary Alice what she majored in up at the school, told me I was lucky to have such a good friend, said that being beaten up like I had would make the cops listen to me more attentively.
"There is so much blood," I heard Husa say worriedly to the nurse.
As they did the combings, Dr. Husa said, "Ah, now, there is a hair from him!" The nurse held the evidence bag open and Dr. Husa shook the combings into it.
"Good," the nurse said.
"Alice," Dr. Husa said, "we are going to let you urinate now but then I will have to take stitches inside."
The nurse helped me sit up and then scooted a bedpan under me. I urinated for such a long time that the nurse and Mary Alice made a point of it, and laughed each time they thought I'd stopped. When I was done, what I saw was a bedpan full of blood, not urine. The nurse covered it quickly with paper from the examining table.
"You don't need to be looking at that."
Mary Alice helped me lie back down.
Dr. Husa had me scoot down so she could take the stitches.
"You'll be sore down here for a few days, maybe a week," Dr. Husa said. "You shouldn't do much, if you can avoid it."
But I couldn't think in terms of days or weeks. I could only focus on the next minute and believe that with each minute it would get better, that slowly all of this might go away.
I told the police not to call my mother. Unaware of my appearance, I believed I could hide the rape from her and from my family. My mother had panic attacks in heavy traffic; I was certain my rape would destroy her.
After the vaginal exam was completed, I was wheeled into a bright white room. This room was used to store large, incredible machines with lifesaving abilities, all shining with stainless steel and spotless fiberglass. Mary Alice had gone back out to the waiting room. I noticed the machines and their details, how clean and new they seemed, because it was the first time I had been alone since the wheels of my rescue were set in motion. I lay on the gurney, naked under the hospital gown, and I was cold. I was not sure why I was there, stored alongside these machines. It was a long time before anyone came.
It was a nurse. I asked her if I could take a shower in the shower stall in the corner. She looked at a chart on the end of the gurney, which I hadn't known was there. I wondered what it said about me, and pictured the word RAPE, in bold red letters, written diagonally across the page.
I lay still and took shallow breaths. The Demerol worked hard to relax me but, still dirty, I fought back. Every inch of my skin prickled and burned. I wanted him off of me. I wanted to shower and scrub my skin raw.
The nurse told me I was waiting for the psychiatrist on call. Then she left the room. It was only fifteen minutes -- but with the buggy crawl of contamination spreading over me, it felt very long -- when a harried psychiatrist entered the room.
I thought, even then, that this doctor needed the Valium he prescribed for me more than I did. He was exhausted. I remember telling him I knew about Valium and so he didn't need to explain.
"It will make you calm," he said.
My mother had been addicted to it when I was little. She had lectured me and my sister on drugs and as I grew older I understood her fear -- that I would get drunk or high and lose my virginity to some fumbling boy. But in these lectures what I always pictured was my vibrant mother diminished somehow, lessened -- as if a gauze had been thrown over her sharp edges.
I couldn't see Valium as the benign drug the doctor made it out to be. I told him this but he pooh-poohed it. When he left the room I did what I knew I would do almost immediately, and crumpled up the prescription to throw it into the waste bin. It felt good to do it. A sort of "fuck you" to the idea that anyone could sweep this thing I'd suffered under the carpet. Even then I thought I knew what could happen if I let people take care of me. I would disappear from view. I wouldn't be Alice anymore, whatever that was.
A nurse came in and told me she could send in another one of my friends to help me. With the painkillers I would need a nurse or someone else to help me keep my balance in the shower. I wanted Mary Alice, but I didn't want to be mean, so I asked for Tree, Mary Alice's roommate and one of our group of six.
I waited and as I did, I tried to think of what I could tell my mother -- some kind of story that would explain why I was so sleepy. I could not know, despite the doctor's warnings, how sore I would be in the morning, or that an elegant latticework of bruises would appear along my thighs and chest, on the undersides of my upper arms and around my neck, where, days later, at home in my bedroom, I would begin to make out the individual pressure points of his fingertips on my throat -- a butterfly of the rapist's two thumbs interlocking in the center and his fingers fluttering out and around my neck. "I'm gonna kill you, bitch. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up." Each repetition punctuated by the smash of my skull against brick, each repetition cutting off, tighter and tighter, the airflow to my brain.
Tree's face, and her gasp, should have told me that I couldn't hide the truth. But she recovered herself quickly and helped me navigate over to the shower stall. She was uncomfortable around me; I was no longer like her but was other than.
I think the way I survived in the early hours after the rape was by spiraling the obsession of how not to tell my mother over and over again in my brain. Convinced it would destroy her, I ceased thinking of what had happened to me and worried about her instead. My worry for her became my life raft. I clung to it, coming in and out of consciousness on my way to the hospital, during the internal stitches of the pelvic exam, and while the psychiatrist gave me the prescription for the very pills that had once made my mother numb.
The shower was in the corner of the room. I walked like a wobbly old lady and Tree steadied me. I was concentrating on my balance and so did not see the mirror to my right until I looked up and I was almost right in front of it.
"Alice, don't," Tree said.
But I was fascinated, the way I had been as a child when, in a special room with low light, I saw an exhibit at the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archaeology. It was nicknamed Blue Baby and it was a mummy, with the disintegrated face and body of a child who had died centuries ago. I recognized something alike in it -- I was a child as this Blue Baby had been a child.
I saw my face in the mirror. I reached my hand up to touch the marks and cuts. That was me. It was also an undeniable truth: No shower would wipe the traces of the rape away. I had no choice but to tell my mother. She was too savvy to believe any story I could now fashion. She worked for a newspaper, and she took pride in the fact that it was impossible to pull the wool over her eyes.
The shower was small and made of white tile. I asked Tree to turn on the water. "As hot as you can," I said.
I took off the hospital gown and handed it to her.
I had to grip the tap and a handle on the side of the shower to stay upright. This left me unable to scrub myself. I remember telling Tree I wished I had a wire brush but that even that wouldn't be enough.
She drew the curtain and I stood there, letting the water beat over me.
"Can you help me?" I asked.
Tree pulled the curtain back a few inches.
"What do you want me to do?"
"I'm afraid I'll fall down. Can you take the soap and help wash me?"
She reached through the water and got the large square brick of soap. She drew it down my back, nothing but the bar of soap touching me. I felt the rapist's words, "worst bitch," as I would feel them almost constantly for years when I undressed in front of other people.
"Forget it," I said, unable to look at her. "I'll do it myself. Just put the soap back."
She did, then pulled the curtain closed, before leaving.
I sat down in the shower. I took a washcloth and lathered it up. I scrubbed hard with the rough towel, under a tap so hot my skin had already turned beet red. The last thing I did was put the towel over my face and with both hands rubbed it back and forth over and over again until the cuts and their blood turned the small white towel pink.
After the hot shower, I dressed in clothes that Tree and Diane had hurriedly selected from the few clean clothes I had. They had forgotten any underwear so I had no bra or underpants. What I did have was a pair of old jeans that I had embroidered flowers on while still in high school and then, when the knees ripped open, had sewn intricate handmade patches on -- long strips of pleated paisley and deep-green velvet. My grandmother had labeled them my "rebel" pants. On top, I wore a thin white-and-red-striped blouse. I left the shirttails out, hoping to hide as much as possible of the jeans.
The heat of the shower and the Demerol worked together to make me groggy during the drive to the police station. I remember seeing the resident advisor, a sophomore named Cindy, outside the security door on the third floor of the police station, called the Public Safety Building. I wasn't prepared to see anyone with such a bright face, such an all-American-coed presence.
Mary Alice stayed outside with Cindy as police officers led me through a security door. I met a plainclothes detective inside. He was short, with longish black hair. He reminded me of Starsky from Starsky and Hutch, and seemed different from the other policemen. He was nice to me but his shift was ending. He assigned me to Sergeant Lorenz, who had not yet arrived at the station.
In hindsight I can only imagine how I appeared to them. My face was swollen, my hair wet, my clothes -- the "rebel" pants especially and the lack of a bra -- and on top of this, the Demerol.
I made a composite from microfilm features. I worked with an officer and was frustrated because none of my rapist's features seemed to be among the fifty or so noses, eyes, and lips. I gave exact descriptions but when nothing was acceptable to me among the tiny black-and-white features I could select, the policeman decided on what was best. The composite that went out that night looked little like him.
The police then took a series of pictures of me, never knowing another series had been taken earlier that night. Ken Childs, a boy I liked, had shot almost a whole roll of film, snapping candids of me in various poses throughout his apartment.
Ken had a crush on me, and I knew that he was taking the pictures to show to people at home over the summer. I knew the photos would be judged. Was I pretty? Did I look smart? Would his friends be reduced to "She seems nice"? Or, worse still, "That's a nice sweater she's wearing"?
I had gained weight, but the jeans I wore were still too big for me, and I'd borrowed my mother's white oxford-cloth shirt and a tan cable cardigan sweater. The word that comes to mind here is frumpy.
So, in the "before" photos taken by Ken Childs, I am at first posing, then giggling, then laughing openly. For all my self-consciousness, I also got lost in the giggling silliness of our crush. I balance a box of raisins on my head, I stare at the writing on the back as if it were a gripping text, I prop my feet up on the edge of his dining table. I smile, smile, smile.
In the "after" photos the police took, I stand shocked. The word shock, in this context, is meant to mean I was no longer there. If you have seen police photos of crime victims, you will know that they appear either bleached or unusually dark. Mine were of the overexposed variety. There were four types of poses. Face. Face and neck. Neck. Standing with identity number. No one tells you at the time how important these photos will be. The cosmetics of rape are central to proving any case. So far, in appearance, I was two for two: I wore loose, unenticing clothes; I had clearly been beaten. Add this to my virginity, and you will begin to understand much of what matters inside the courtroom.
Finally, I was allowed to leave the Public Safety Building with Cindy, Mary Alice, and Tree. I told the officers in the station that I would return in a few hours and could be counted on to give an affidavit and look through mug shots. I wanted them to see I was serious, I wouldn't let them down. But they were working the night shift. Even when I did come back -- and in their minds, it was far from certain that I would -- they wouldn't be there to see I'd kept my word.
The police drove us back to Marion Dorm. It was early in the morning. Light had begun to creep up over Thorden Park at the top of the hill. I had to tell my mother.
The dorm was deathly quiet. Cindy went into her room at the top of the hall and Mary Alice and I agreed we would meet her there momentarily. Neither of us had a private phone.
We went to my room, where I found a bra and underwear to put on under my clothes.
Back out in the hallway, we ran into Diane and her boyfriend, Victor. They had been up all night, waiting for me to come home.
My relationship to Victor, before that morning, consisted primarily of not understanding what he had in common with Diane, whom I found loud. He was handsome and athletic and very, very quiet around all of us. He had entered school already having chosen his major. It was something like electrical engineering. Very different from poetry. Victor was black.
"Alice," Diane said.
Other people came out of Cindy's open doorway. Girls I knew vaguely or those I didn't know.
"Victor wants to hug you," Diane said.
I looked at Victor. This was too much. He was not my rapist, I knew that. That was not the issue. But he was blocking my way to the last thing on earth I wanted to do and the thing I knew I had to do. Make that call to my mother.
"I don't think I can," I said to Victor.
"He was black, wasn't he?" Victor asked. He was trying to get me to look at him, look right at him.
"Yes."
"I'm sorry," he said. He was crying. The tears ran slowly down the outside of his cheeks. "I'm so sorry."
I don't know whether I hugged him because I could not stand to see him crying (so odd in the Victor I knew, the quiet Victor who studied diligently or smiled shyly at Diane), or because I was prompted further by those around us. He held me until I had to pull away and then he let me go. He was miserable, and I cannot even now imagine what was going on inside his head. Perhaps he already knew that both relatives and strangers would say things to me like "I bet he was black," and so he wanted to give me something to counter this, some experience in the same twenty-four hours that would make me resist placing people in categories and aiming at them my full-on hate. It was my first hug from a man after the rape -- black or white -- and all I knew was that I couldn't give anything back. The arms around me, the vague threat of physical power, were all too much.
By the end, Victor and I had an audience. It was something I would have to get used to. Standing close to him, but separated from the embrace, I was aware of Mary Alice and of Diane. They belonged. The others were foggy and off to the side. They were watching my life as if it were a movie. In their version of the story, where did they fit? I would find out over the years that in a few versions, I was their best friend. Knowing a victim is like knowing a celebrity. Particularly when the crime is clouded in taboo. When I was doing research for this book, back in Syracuse, I met a woman like this. Without recognizing me at first, only knowing I was writing a book on Alice Sebold's rape case, she hurried in from another room and told me and those assisting me that "the victim in that case was my best friend." I had no idea who she was. When someone referred to me by name, she blinked and then came forward, embracing me to save face.
In Cindy's room, I sat down on the bed closest to the door. Cindy, Mary Alice, and Tree were there, perhaps Diane. Cindy had shooed the others out and shut her door.
It was time. I sat with the phone in my lap. My mother was only a few miles away, having driven up the day before to take me home from Syracuse. She would be up and puttering around her hotel room at the Holiday Inn. At that time she traveled with her own coffeemaker because she made decaf in her room. She was coming down from as much as ten cups of coffee a day, and restaurants weren't yet in the custom of serving decaf.
Before she had dropped me off at Ken Childs's house the evening before, we had agreed she would come to the dorm around 8:30 a.m. -- a late start for her but a concession to the fact that I would have been up late saying good-bye to friends. I looked around at my girlfriends, hoping they would say, "You don't look so bad," or provide me with the single and perfect story to explain the cuts and bruises on my face -- the story that I hadn't been able to come up with during the night.
Tree dialed the phone.
When my mother picked up, Tree said, "Mrs. Sebold, this is a friend of Alice's, Tree Roebeck."
Maybe my mother said hello.
"I'm going to put Alice on the phone now. She needs to speak with you."
Tree handed me the phone.
"Mom," I started.
She must not have heard what I thought was the obvious quaver in my voice. She was irritated.
"What is it, Alice? You know I'm due over soon; can't it wait?"
"Mom, I need to tell you something."
She heard it now. "What, what is it?"
I said it as if I were reading a line from a script.
"Last night I was beaten and raped in the park."
My mother said, "Oh, my God," and then, after a quick inhalation of breath, a startled gasp, she reeled herself in. "Are you all right?"
"Can you come get me, Mommy?" I asked.
She said it would be twenty minutes or so, she had to pack up and check out, but she would be there.
I hung up the phone.
Mary Alice suggested that we wait in her room until my mother arrived. Someone had bought bagels or doughnuts.
In the time since our arrival back at the dorm, students had woken up. There was hurry all around me. Many students, including my friends, were meeting parents for breakfast or rushing to bus stations and airports. People would attend to me and then switch off to finish packing. I sat with my back against the cinder-block dorm wall. As people came in and out and the door opened, I could hear bits of conversation.
"Where is she?" "Raped..." "...see her face?" "...she know him?" "...always weird..."
I had not eaten anything since the night before -- since the raisins at Ken Childs's house -- and I could not look at the bagels or doughnuts without feeling what -- the rapist's penis -- had last been in my mouth. I tried to stay awake. I had been up for more than twenty-four hours -- far longer, what with the all-nighters that I'd pulled during finals week -- but I was afraid to fall asleep before my mother got there. My girlfriends and the resident advisor, who, after all, was only nineteen, tried to take care of me, but I had begun to notice that I was now on the other side of something they could not understand. I didn't understand it myself.
Copyright © 1999 by Alice Sebold
From AudioFile
After her brutal rape on the Syracuse University campus in 1981, Alice Sebold was told she was lucky to be alive. The previous victim had been murdered. With unsparing honesty, Sebold pulls us into that tunnel where, amid glass and filth, she is viciously attacked and beaten. Syracuse police, rape crisis workers, and the reactions of other students mark her transformation from a bright college coed, an 18-year-old virgin, to "the girl who was raped." Her life is forever altered, as are her relationships with everyone, from her fragile mother given to panic attacks and her tightly wired father to the sister who feels upstaged by everything Alice does. Sebold's reading is remarkable for its exacting self-control. Her memoir is hard and human. Her reading is mesmerizing. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
Product details
- ASIN : B002PEP4C8
- Publisher : Scribner; Reprint edition (September 17, 2009)
- Publication date : September 17, 2009
- Language : English
- File size : 1271 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 289 pages
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
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Alice Sebold is the author of three #1 bestselling books, including Lucky, and the novels The Lovely Bones and The Almost Moon. Her work has been translated into more than fifty languages and has appeared in The New York Times and The Guardian, among other publications. She is a member of the National Leadership Council for RAINN.org (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network). She lives in California.
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3 Stars
Damaged book
Some book but thought it would be the one in the available picture, instead I got an old used book.
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Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
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Reviewed in the United States on January 17, 2022
Reviewed in the United States on December 19, 2009
In the first five pages, Alice, a freshman in college at the time, is brutally raped. It's graphic, horrible and once I'd gone through with it her - I was in for the ride to find out what happens to a woman that might not have made it out alive that night.
I'm not sure you can "enjoy" a true story about rape and dealing with it's aftermath - but, this is a page-turning read that hurled me into her nightmare and subsequent struggle for inner understanding and justice. And, it left me thinking about it long after I was through.
Here's the upsides and downsides to me depending on what you prefer:
- Candid writing, that's not a pity-party
Sebold's direct style and candid look at this time in her life, combined with her writing skills are what drew me in. At the same time, she's not overly emotional or hysterical about it (even during describing her rape). She simply recounts it. I can't imagine that any woman wouldn't be simultaneously drawn into it and repelled by the thought of her experiences happening to them.
- It's not The Lovely Bones: Deluxe Edition
If you're a fan of her other book, and expecting that same kind of optimism in this one, you're just not going to like it as much. This is, afterall, a linear account of a real life horrific crime with a living victim - not the fictionalized version.
- You might not agree with all of her choices, but it's still a story of tragedy and triumph.
Some of the negative reviewers seem to dislike her choices and behaviour at times. Because her tale gripped me, it did make me think or hope sometimes that I would handle things differently. But, the fact that she's so candid about her thoughts and actions when she was just a young college kid - is what makes this one unique.
Bottom Line: Engrossing, direct, not overly emotional, roller coaster of a ride through another woman's tragedy and aftermath. Definitely worth a read.
I'm not sure you can "enjoy" a true story about rape and dealing with it's aftermath - but, this is a page-turning read that hurled me into her nightmare and subsequent struggle for inner understanding and justice. And, it left me thinking about it long after I was through.
Here's the upsides and downsides to me depending on what you prefer:
- Candid writing, that's not a pity-party
Sebold's direct style and candid look at this time in her life, combined with her writing skills are what drew me in. At the same time, she's not overly emotional or hysterical about it (even during describing her rape). She simply recounts it. I can't imagine that any woman wouldn't be simultaneously drawn into it and repelled by the thought of her experiences happening to them.
- It's not The Lovely Bones: Deluxe Edition
If you're a fan of her other book, and expecting that same kind of optimism in this one, you're just not going to like it as much. This is, afterall, a linear account of a real life horrific crime with a living victim - not the fictionalized version.
- You might not agree with all of her choices, but it's still a story of tragedy and triumph.
Some of the negative reviewers seem to dislike her choices and behaviour at times. Because her tale gripped me, it did make me think or hope sometimes that I would handle things differently. But, the fact that she's so candid about her thoughts and actions when she was just a young college kid - is what makes this one unique.
Bottom Line: Engrossing, direct, not overly emotional, roller coaster of a ride through another woman's tragedy and aftermath. Definitely worth a read.
Top reviews from other countries
georgia
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic book- amazingly written and beautiful told! Felt personal
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 19, 2022
Wanted to get back into reading and wanted to find a book that was hard hitting.
Susan Jane
5.0 out of 5 stars
Nothing Lucky About This Book
Reviewed in Australia on November 29, 2018
This is the harrowing true story of the novel Lucky Bones, which Peter Jackson made into a film of the same name came about. As an 18 year old college student, author Alice Sebold was brutally raped and beaten in a park close to her college campus. Sebold writes with larity and compassion how this ghastly experience impacted upon her life and relationships.
Bakergirl90
5.0 out of 5 stars
Incredible
Reviewed in Canada on April 26, 2016
This book is real, violent, vivid and raw. Alice doesnt sugarcoat her rape and the effect it had on her life. She doesnt try and diminish her feelings of anger, her need for revenge and the devastation she felt for many years after her assault. I like how the author didnt try and make herself or her family seem perfect; she acknowledged the reality that we are all flawed and try out best in life.
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e-green
5.0 out of 5 stars
心の深淵へ
Reviewed in Japan on December 28, 2002
著者の実体験を綴った半生記。
rapeされているのに，なぜ，自ら服を脱いでしまうのか。なぜ，言われるままに体を開いてしまうのか。なぜ，言われるままにキスをしてしまうのか。
傷を癒さない家族の言葉，精神科医の言葉。
そして，裁判。（小説や映画に描かれた虚構の裁判ではなく，本物の裁判！）
rape後の初めてのセックス。
友だちもまたrapeされて…
悪夢。ヘロインへの耽溺。
rapeがいかに心を踏みにじるのかということを，わかっている人はどれだけいるのだろうか…
心の奥深くをかいま見，感じることができる，深く，重い本です。
rapeされているのに，なぜ，自ら服を脱いでしまうのか。なぜ，言われるままに体を開いてしまうのか。なぜ，言われるままにキスをしてしまうのか。
傷を癒さない家族の言葉，精神科医の言葉。
そして，裁判。（小説や映画に描かれた虚構の裁判ではなく，本物の裁判！）
rape後の初めてのセックス。
友だちもまたrapeされて…
悪夢。ヘロインへの耽溺。
rapeがいかに心を踏みにじるのかということを，わかっている人はどれだけいるのだろうか…
心の奥深くをかいま見，感じることができる，深く，重い本です。
Jeff
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not happy with this purchase
Reviewed in India on March 28, 2018
Disappointed. She could have written this real experiences in to far better way if she had focused on explaining how a rape victim can surmount those emotional trauma from their painful experience. The author just Scribbled too many unnecessary childhood stories instead of writing some core things.
I just threw this book after reading 80 pages.
I just threw this book after reading 80 pages.
