The Women's Room

by Marilyn French

  There are no answers for this bleak mess. None that I know, anyway. Some days later, the governor of Ohio, who had sent the National Guard out armed that day, was defeated in a primary, and Mira turned to Ben, who had his arms around her as they watched TV, and cried out, ‘See! See! The whole country feels the way we do.’

  Quietly, grimly, Ben said, ‘He was slated to lose that primary by more percentage points than he did. He gained popularity by doing what he did.’

  Mira turned back to the TV set with a staring white face.

  But that was later. Then they were all sitting in Val’s kitchen, talking about the size of the crowd, the spectacle of the aerial shots, trying to estimate numbers. They were really all sitting around waiting for the eleven o’clock news, and just killing time between. Most of all they wanted to feel – not good, that wasn’t possible, or even powerful, no, that wasn’t possible either – but just as if they had at least enough power to make a statement; they wanted to feel that they had been tiny parts of a communicative and therefore significant act. They had sent up their burnt offering and were waiting for a small rain of reply.

  In the midst of this tension, the phone rang, and everyone froze. We were silent as Val stepped across bodies to the wall where the phone hung, silent as she picked it up. So we all heard it, the voice on the other end. Because it screamed, it shrieked, it was a high, little girl voice, and it cried out: ‘MOMMY! MOMMY!’

  ‘What is it, Chris?’ Val said, her whole body taut. Her fingers, Mira noticed, were twisted together and white. But her voice was calm.

  ‘MOMMY!’ Chris’s voice screamed. ‘I’ve been raped!’

  17

  It seems incredible now, looking back, that all of that could have been jumbled together the way it was. I am amazed that any of us survived it. But I guess the human race has survived worse. I know it has. The question is, at what cost? Because wounds do leave scars, and scar tissue has no feeling. That’s what people forget when they train their sons to be ‘men’ by injuring them. There is a price for survival.

  Val spoke calmly to Chris. Quickly she got details, told her to lock her door, to hang up and call the police, and she, Val, would be waiting, would be standing by the phone, and Chris was to call her as soon as the police came, or before, as soon as she had stopped talking to them. Quickly, briskly, she spoke and Chris kept saying, ‘Yes. Okay. Yes, Mommy. I will.’ She sounded twelve.

  Val hung up the phone. She was standing beside the wall, and she turned and laid her head against it. She just stood there. Everyone had heard; no one knew what to do. At last, Kyla went up and touched her arm.

  ‘You want us to stay with you? Or do you want us to get out of here?’

  ‘There’s no reason for you to stay,’ Val said, still facing the wall.

  Swiftly, silently, people stood to leave. It was not that they did not care. It was a sense of delicacy, of intrusion on some part of Val’s life that was more private even than her sexual adventures, or an account of her menstrual cycle. They went over to her, they touched her lightly, they said good night.

  ‘If there is anything I can do …’ everyone said.

  But of course, there wasn’t. What can you do with grief but respect it? Only Bart and Ben and Mira stayed. Val stood by the wall. Mira made drinks for all of them. Val smoked. Bart got her a chair and sat her in it, and when the phone rang again, he picked it up, and Val gasped, as if she thought he was going to take the call, but he handed it to her, and then he brought her an ashtray. The voice on the other end was softer now, and they could not hear it. Eventually, Val hung up. The police had come to Chris’s apartment. The boy who had raped her was gone. He had raped her a few doors away from her house, and she had somehow gotten home and called the only person she could think to call, who happened, Val said grimly, to be a thousand miles away. The police were taking her to the hospital. Val had the name written on the wall. She dialed Chicago information and got the number of the hospital.

  ‘It’s crazy, but I have to do something,’ she said, smoking nervously. ‘Someone has to look after her, even if it’s at a distance.’

  They sat there until three. Val kept calling. She called the hospital, where they left her dangling so long that she hung up and called again. And again, and again. Finally they told her Chris was no longer there. The police had taken her down to the station. Val called the Chicago police. It took some time and many calls to find out what precinct Chris had been taken to, but she found it finally, and got through, and asked what was happening to her child. They were not sure. They kept her dangling, but she held on. Eventually Chris came to the phone. Her voice sounded, Val said later, hysterical but controlled.

  ‘Don’t press charges,’ Val said.

  Chris argued. The police wanted her to do it. She knew the name and address of the boy who had raped her. They had other charges against him and they wanted, as they put it, to nail him.

  ‘Don’t do it,’ Val kept saying. ‘You don’t know what it will cost you.’

  But Chris was oblivious. ‘They want me to, and I’m going to,’ she said and hung up.

  Val sat stunned. ‘She doesn’t know what she’s doing,’ she said, still holding the receiver in her hand. The dial tone buzzed through the room. She stood up and dialed again, got the station again. The man who answered was annoyed now: Val was becoming an irritation. He told her to hang on. He did not return. She waited ten minutes, then hung up and dialed again. In time, someone answered. He did not seem to know what she was talking about.

  ‘I’ll see,’ he said. ‘Hold on.’

  She held on for a long time, and eventually he returned.

  ‘Sorry, ma’am, but she’s gone. They took her home.’

  Val thanked him, hung up, and sank back into her chair. Then she started up, fished in a cabinet for the phone book, and riffled through the Yellow Pages. She dialed an airline and made a reservation for the following morning. She turned to Mira.

  ‘Do you think you could drive me to the airport?’

  Of course, Mira and Ben would drive her.

  Val waited, smoking. After twenty minutes, she dialed Chris’s apartment. There was no answer. She waited ten more minutes and dialed again. No answer. The group sat there with her for another hour. There was no answer, although she dialed six times. Bart’s knuckles were pale pink.

  Val sighed and slumped, ‘She’s gone someplace else. Sensible. Probably staying with a friend.’ She stood and reached to a shelf for a small notebook, riffled through it, and dialed another number. It was four in the morning. Someone answered, because Val was talking. Her voice was subdued, but tremulous. She was telling someone about the rape. ‘Yes, I’m flying out in the morning.’ There was a silence, then she said ‘Yes,’ again, and hung up. She turned to her friends.

  ‘That was Chris’s father. I thought he ought to know. I thought he’d want to know. She has spent holidays with him for the last fourteen years. She’s not a stranger to him.’ Her tone was odd.

  ‘What did he say?’ Mira asked.

  ‘He said it was good I was going to her.’

  She went to the counter and poured a drink. She sipped it, and tried to smile at them. The smile looked as if it were cracking her face, so strained were its lines.

  ‘Go on home and get some sleep. And thanks for staying. Thanks for feeling that you would stay whether I wanted you or not. Because I didn’t want you to stay and I’m grateful that you did, and I realize the only people I wanted to stay were those who didn’t give a shit whether I wanted them to or not.’

  They laughed: such complexities after such strains!

  She was packed and dressed by nine thirty and Mira and Ben drove her to Logan. Her plane left at eleven. She admitted that she had not slept, but Val did not look too bad after a sleepless night. It was the day after that she showed wear. So when she left, she still had some glow, some sheen.

  When she returned, that was gone. Actually, her friends did not see her when she returned.
She and Chris had taken a cab from the airport, and it was several days before Val called any of her friends. She had been gone only a few days – four, or five perhaps. Everyone went over to see her and Chris, but both of them acted very strangely. Chris would barely speak, and glared at the people she had kissed good-bye last fall. She sat in a corner of a chair looking sullen. Val was strained and brittle. She tried to make conversation, but it was obviously an effort. She did not encourage them to stay, and not knowing what to do, they left. They were concerned and talking among themselves. They decided to leave her alone for a few days, until she unwound, and then visit one at a time.

  I saw Val around that time and what struck me were her eyes. I have seen eyes like that since: they were staring at me out of the head of a Polish Jew who had spent her young adulthood in a concentration camp. The causes hardly seem parallel, but perhaps they were not so dissimilar. For I heard the story of that time, later.

  Chris had been on her way home from a peace demonstration in Chicago, and was in high spirits, thinking she had done something good, and having had a good time. After the demonstration, she and some friends and a teaching assistant at the university had gone out for a pizza and a couple of beers. Chris’s apartment was in a fairly safe neighborhood, and she walked home from the subway. Her legs were tired and she was wearing bad shoes – they had high wedges and thin straps around the ankles. She was a few doors from her apartment, walking along the sidewalk, when a boy leaped out at her from between two parked cars. He had leaped, not stepped, and he stood directly in her path. She was instantly terrified and thought about her rotten shoes. There was no way she could run fast in them, and no way she could slip them off her feet. He asked her for a cigarette. She gave him one, and tried to pass coolly by him, but he grabbed her arm. ‘What do you want?’ she shouted. ‘Match,’ he said, wiggling the cigarette at her. ‘Let go,’ she said, but he didn’t. ‘I can’t get a match unless you let go.’ He let go of her arm, but moved his body so that again he stood directly in front of her. Behind her, she knew, were the two empty blocks back to the subway. It was only about nine thirty, but there were no people on the streets. She handed him the match-book, her mind whirring. The apartment buildings rose darkly around her. She did not want to scream. Perhaps he was just trying to frighten her – her scream might frighten him, turn him violent. People were killed every week on Chicago streets. She decided to play cool. She asked him to get out of her way, then tried to walk around him. He grabbed her and pulled her off the sidewalk; he had one hand over her mouth. He pushed her down in the street between the two parked cars and held his hand over her mouth. He leaned down toward her ear and said softly that in the last months he had killed three people along these very blocks, that if she screamed, he would kill her. She did not see a weapon, she did not know whether to believe him, but she was too terrified to challenge him. She nodded, and he let her mouth go.

  He pulled her pants off and put his penis, which was already stiff, into her. He thrust hard and fast and came quickly. She lay there wide-eyed, unable to breathe. When he was finished, he lay on top of her.

  ‘Can I get up now?’ she asked, hearing the trembling in her own voice. He laughed. She was thinking hard. It was not unknown for rapists to kill their victims. He was not going to let her go easily. Chris searched her mind. She never once thought of the possibility of using physical force to fight him; it never entered her mind that there was any way to get away from him except by outwitting him. She tried to imagine what would make a person a rapist. She thought of all the excuses for crime she had already heard, and all those she could imagine.

  ‘I bet you’ve had a hard life,’ she said after a while.

  The boy got off her then, and asked her for a cigarette. They sat there smoking, as he talked. He told her wild, disorganized things; he told her about his mother, who was violent, and the things she had done to him as a child. Chris clucked and murmured.

  Suddenly there was a noise, and the boy threw her down again with his hand on her throat. Some people had come out of an apartment building and were standing on the sidewalk talking. Chris hoped they would see the cigarette smoke rising from the street. She did not dare to scream. She felt if she had tried, her voice would have frozen in her throat. The men got in a car, one parked a few cars down, and drove off. The boy kept her head down, though, and stuffed his penis in her mouth. ‘Do it,’ he ordered, holding her head down and moving up and down over her. She was choking, she thought she would swallow her tongue, but he kept going, and he came right in her mouth, and the salty stinging semen burned her throat. She got her head up when he was through and choked and spat out the semen. He smiled. She tried to stand up, but he grabbed her arm.

  ‘You’re not going anyplace.’

  She sat down again. She felt totally defeated. She tried to gather her wits and get him talking again. If she made him think she was his friend … She talked sympathetically, and he opened up. He talked about school, his block, his knowledge of the neighborhood, of much of Chicago. He knew, he boasted, all the alleys and dead ends for miles around. She listened with high sensitivity. She felt it would be fatal to make a move before he was in the right frame of mind. The moment had to be perfect. Once, she moved her body a little, and he threw her down instantly and was on top of her again, with his stiffened penis in her. It was clear to her that the thing that turned him on was his own violence, or a sense of her helplessness.

  They sat up again, and smoked. ‘Listen, I’m awfully tired. I’d like to go home,’ Chris said finally.

  ‘Why? It’s early. This here’s nice,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, but I’m tired. Look, let me go home now, and we can get together another night, Okay?’

  He smiled at her incredulously. ‘Really? You mean it?’

  She smiled back. Oh, the wily female of the species! ‘Sure.’

  He grew excited. ‘Hey, gimme your name and address and I’ll give you mine, and I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ Chris swallowed. They exchanged papers. Chris was afraid to put down a false name, because he could see her true one standing there on her notebooks. And she was afraid to put down a false address: he would no doubt watch her enter her apartment. But she put down a false telephone number, somehow imagining that that would save her. He let her get up then. She pulled her clothes together as well as she could, and stood there facing him for a moment. It was imperative, she thought, not to run.

  ‘Well, so long.’

  ‘Yeah. See ya, Chris.’

  ‘Yeah.’ She turned gently, and stepped up onto the sidewalk. ‘Bye,’ she said again. He stood watching her as she walked rigidly toward her building, fiddled with her key – her hands were shaking – all the while trying to hear over the beating of her heart if he was coming after her, if he was just then right beside her, if he would force his way in, throw the door open and her inside. But he did not. She got the door open, got inside it, pulled the bolt and ran toward the inner door. She unlocked that and got inside and slammed it and bolted it. She was too terrified to turn on the light; she was too terrified to look out, as if he had the power to destroy her even from the street. She could not think what to do. She ran to the phone and dialed her mother in Boston. But then as soon as she opened her mouth, all that would come out was screams and sobs.

  After she spoke to Val, she carefully, methodically followed her instructions. She was still screaming and crying: it would not stop. She dialed the operator and asked for the police. Somehow she told them what had happened and where she was. They were there in a short time; she could see the flashing light of the police car reflected in her room, even without going to the window. They knocked at the door, and despite the trembling of her hands, she was able to let them in. Her mouth kept crying; the sobs were coming from her depths.

  They got her story and the slip of paper with the boy’s name and address on it, and their eyebrows raised. They told her they would take her to the hospital. They trea
ted her gently. She remembered she had to call her mother. When she hung up, she turned to them feeling as though she had severed all moorings and was now letting herself go into a frightful ocean. They took her to a hospital where she was put on a stretcher on wheels and left in a room alone. She was still crying. She hadn’t stopped. But her mind had begun to work again. People came in and began to look at her body. They examined her vagina; she had to put her legs up in stirrups. And all the while she was crying and feeling demolished, people getting at her, all interested in the same place, that was all she was, vulva, vagina, cunt, cunt, cunt, that was all, there was nothing else, that’s all there was in the world, that’s all she had ever been in the world, cunt, cunt, cunt, that was all. They examined her and ignored her. They did not give her a sedative, or try to talk to her. She kept saying over and over in her mind, while her throat kept crying, I am, I am, I am, I am Christine Truax, I am a student, I study politics, I am, I am Christine Truax. I am a student, I study politics, incantationally, hypnotically, as they led her out, still ignoring her sobbing, and put her back in the police car.