All the Silent Spaces

by Christine Ristaino

  “We don’t have to talk if you don’t want to,” I say to her when I spy her hiding behind a chair. “Just sit with me for a while.”

  She climbs on my lap and I hold her. I can see by the shape of her face she feels relaxed, safe. I tell her how much I love her and tears come to my eyes and then they are falling one by one, but I’m really crying about the game and things I’ve never told my family.

  My brothers don’t realize I was raped at a young age by somebody I didn’t know, nor that I was molested at an even younger age by somebody we all knew. As a result of these two events, distrust has crept into every corner of my life.

  My husband and father can’t understand why meat has to be cooked so thoroughly. My mother laughs at me when I flee from the cancer-causing chemicals she sprays on the table to kill germs. My father says I’m ridiculously paranoid when I want to replace the dead batteries in his fire alarm.

  “We’ll smell it if there’s smoke here,” he says. “What are the chances of a fire, anyway?”

  But the chances of being molested, raped, or assaulted are higher than I ever imagined, and I’m willing to bet these odds extend to fire, salmonella, or cancer.

  When I leave my parents’ home at the end of our vacation, I tear up. When I say goodbye to my family, I feel empty. When I see my brothers’ curly hair, their eyes, their sweet smiles, their profiles, and when Milo hums a bar to the song “Convoy” from the seventies and we all hum the rest, I know how special they are, what we’ve survived together, and how much I’ve survived without them.

  Retrogression 16:

  September 15, 2007, 9:50 p.m.

  I step out of the ambulance and my husband reaches for my hand. He puts his arm around me; says nothing. He talks with my sister-in-law, Olivia, and I take in the rhythm of their words.

  Chapter 16:

  Aikido

  During my first class with him, Rutherford Sensei said his aikido sensibility had saved his life. He and his nephew were on a highway. He was driving. A truck swerved and became perpendicular to his car. The car almost went underneath the bed of the truck, but Sensei figured out how to drive into the small sliver of space that stood between them, and then into a safety zone, without panicking.

  I can only liken one’s first aikido lesson to awkward teenage lovemaking. You know there should be benefits, but you can’t quite figure out what you’re doing. I spent most of the first few lessons pinned beneath my classmates as they explained how to correctly complete the techniques.

  I had taken five classes of aikido before I left for a family vacation. I had learned how to roll out of a sticky situation and could also awkwardly finish some of the moves. But upon my return, I felt just as lost as I had on the first day. As I struggled with one move after another, I wondered how long it would be until the techniques felt familiar and natural. It was at this point that the belt holding my aikido top in place became loose and unhinged. When it happened, I couldn’t understand why my partner stepped away mid-move.

  “Did I do something wrong?” I asked him.

  “You lost your belt,” said Rutherford Sensei, who had been observing us.

  I looked down to see an open shirt, my brown bra, and a navel.

  “Oh,” I said. “I can’t believe . . .”

  But by this time, Sensei and my partner had begun to attack and effortlessly throw each other into a roll, one after the other with butterfly movements.

  Before I left for vacation, we had been working on grabs. How do you destabilize a person enough so he or she loses balance and ends up on the ground? I discovered when I returned that we had finished grabs. We were now figuring out how to sidestep a punch. I was told to punch straight toward the person’s face, but I was much shorter than my partner. I moved my hand upward, but stopped midway. The man I was hitting, a tall, muscular man, looked at me and waited.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  “But I don’t want to hit you,” I told him.

  “I know you don’t,” he said. “None of us do. And you won’t. I’m ready.”

  So I tried to hit him—four times to be exact. Each time he blocked, grabbed me, pivoted, and placed me gently on the floor, turning my arm just a smidge to give me a slight gnawing pain in my wrist. When I felt the pain, I would signal with my other hand that it had started to hurt.

  Then he tried to hit me and I blocked. He talked me through it. “You make a triangle with your arms. Yes, that’s right. Now you want to pivot and take me with you. One more step. Yes, now put me on the floor. Turn.” His hand would go down and it would be done. Each time he punched toward me, I blocked. Every time I blocked, he told me how to bring him down.

  Rutherford Sensei clapped and we returned to a kneeling position on the floor. As Sensei demonstrated and explained the next move, in my mind I compared the hand of the aikido student to the one that had come down on my face two months before. This man’s hand was firm and purposeful. The other hand swung at me with no real direction. Contact with the aikido student connected me to him. Every second of this encounter, I felt looked after. With every second of the first one, I had felt more and more alone.

  My next partner was a sturdy woman, only slightly taller than me. Again I was to hit her in the face and again I paused.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll move away. It’s okay.”

  I raised my hand and stopped.

  “You can hit me,” she said. “I’ll move.”

  Mid-strike I stopped again. I couldn’t do it. “I was attacked recently,” I said. Tears filled my eyes. I wiped them as she tried to explain the move to me.

  “Do you want to sit down?” she finally asked when I still stood there after the third explanation.

  “No,” I said. “I’ll try. Could you explain once more?”

  “Perhaps we can modify the move a bit. Here, you grab behind my arm and we won’t do the first part.”

  Three moves and two partners later, I had stopped wiping tears and my nose on my gi. The loose, white robe had exposed me earlier, but now its towel-like material had absorbed everything.

  Retrogression 17:

  September 15, 2007, 9:30 p.m.

  I can hear the children’s voices, not their words but cadences, as they rise and fall. I imagine they are giving him a play-by-play of the attack and he is listening. I breathe in, not because the medic told me to do so, but because hearing my husband’s voice allows me to.

  Chapter 17:

  Grief

  I was in college, out for a drink with Emily. She had recently joined the swim team I was on, and I didn’t know her well yet.

  It was mid swim season and Saratoga Springs, New York, was cold and snowy. As Emily and I left the bar, the wind whipped the back of my neck. The house where I lived was far down the road, but Emily’s room was only a block away.

  “Let’s go to my dorm,” Emily said.

  Emily and I ran as the wind seeped through our clothes, touching every part of us. We could see her building in the distance—institutional, pink, familiar. The hot air hit us as we entered. Our cheeks reddened. We walked into Emily’s room, took off our coats, threw them onto a chair, and sat on her bed until heat moved into our bodies. The room spun. This was five months after I had been raped.

  With the exception of a few school friends, I had barely told anybody. I leaned my head back onto her pillow and looked up at the low ceiling. I began to talk about the rape and what it had forced me to remember. For most of my life, I had ignored this event, pretended the day I had been molested had never happened. Sobs moved up my throat, filling the room with grief, rolling out of me in waves, one after the other. The next morning I woke, covered by a fuzzy blanket, Emily asleep next to me, her arm on my shoulder.

  Retrogression 18:

  September 15, 2007, 8:50 p.m.

  The medics motion to me. I hear the fluency of nearby voices: my sister-in-law, Olivia; my Unitarian friends, Louise and Donna; my children. I strain to hear what they are saying. “W
e can’t tell if your nose is broken. Any pain?” the medics ask. “Yes, and in the back of my head.” “Yeah, you look like you’ve been banged up. You’re going to have some bruises under your eyes. And you’re pretty scratched up here around your shoulders.” I stop listening, melt into the hard mattress, hear my children’s voices and then a new voice, as familiar as the sun—my husband’s.

  Chapter 18:

  The Parking Attendant

  “We don’t take credit cards,” the man in the window said. I tried to place his accent and thought about the allergist’s office I visited once a week for a shot. They took cards, I remembered.

  “You don’t?” I asked. “Lots of parking lots do.”

  “Well, we don’t,” he responded.

  I had just finished visiting my doctor and it had gone well. It took less than an hour and I was relatively healthy.

  “I only have a dollar and thirteen cents,” I told him and handed him the dollar. “Do you mind if I go to the bank and return with more money?”

  He sighed and looked at me, rolled his eyes, and finally said with an expression that didn’t inspire any hope I would return, “Look. You owe me a dollar. Come back.”

  I drove away and found a bank machine, put my card in, and agreed to pay the machine fee for withdrawing money. “Insufficient funds,” was the machine’s response to my request. Well, I had known we were close this month.

  I walked to my car and rifled through the ashtray, drink holders, CD compartment. I opened the trunk and lifted the items there one by one: a lifejacket with hearts on it, my son’s Polar Bear, Polar Bear book, a folder, a huge poster of Italy, bargain-framed, and a diaper bag with pissed-on clothes in it from the day before. I really need to take this bag inside, I thought.

  Exhaling, I stuck my hand into the bag and felt around for change, coming up for air with fifteen cents. I closed the trunk and walked slowly to the door on the driver’s side. Then I got in and drove back.

  I parked on the side of the road and approached the parking lot exit. There were two booths. Which one was it? I wondered.

  I watched the two men in the windows as they worked. They both looked like the man I had spoken with. Why can’t I tell the difference between two black men? I said almost out loud.

  I was comforted only slightly by the realization that I don’t distinguish well between blond girls either. Is that any different? I wondered as I waited for the men to look up. Why did the first oversight seem so much more offensive to me?

  The man in the second booth recognized me. “You came back,” he said and smiled, the first smile I had seen from him.

  “Look,” I said as I approached his booth. “It’s the end of the month. I don’t have it. I did find fifteen cents. I could give you my address and you could bill me.”

  “No, it’s okay. Pay me the next time,” he said and his eyes seemed to invite me closer to the window.

  “Are you sure?” I asked, leaning in.

  “It’s okay. You’re honest.”

  I said the words to myself. I’m honest.

  I had known this about myself, but somehow, coming from him, it meant more to me now. I nodded, a long nod from somebody who was no longer a dollarless wretch, and walked to my car, feeling as rich as the prodigal son must have the day he returned home.

  Retrogression 19:

  September 15, 2007, 8:15 p.m.

  I call two numbers from Louise’s cell phone, the only two I have memorized in Atlanta. My husband’s voice—I leave a message. “Hit in the face,” “robbed,” “we’re okay,” “kids weren’t hurt,” “Druid Hills and Briarcliff.” Another to my sister-in-law, Olivia, who lives twenty minutes away. She arrives in seconds it seems. “My God, Christine. This is terrible,” she says.

  Chapter 19:

  Intuition

  I had felt the darkness of the night engulf me as soon as I stepped out of my house. It swallowed me up, made me rush to my car, unlock the door quickly, and relock it just as fast. It was 11:00 p.m. on a Thursday night, and I was counting on using the drive-through to pick up a prescription I had dropped off earlier without ever having to leave my car. When I arrived at the pharmacy, I saw the drive-through was closed. Shit, I thought, and parked.

  I was even more disappointed when I realized I had made the trip for nothing, since the pharmacy had closed at 10:00 p.m. I exited the store and walked on the sidewalk toward my car. I turned and there in front of me, inches away, stood a black man. I was propelled backward three steps. It was as though I had lost control of my body and something else had taken over my legs. The man stopped walking and stood to the side of my car. We stared at each other for what seemed like much longer than it should have been. Every cell in my body was aware of a potential threat, every cell alert and ready for a counterattack had there needed to be one.

  A car pulled into the lot.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

  Shaking myself out of my stupor, I walked past the man. Our bodies were inches apart as he slid by. I put the keys into the car door and watched him and the new arrivals enter the store. Once in the car, I turned on the radio and looked for a good song, trying not to cry.

  The image of this man at the drugstore parking lot stayed with me into the next day. I couldn’t shake him off. I was still feeling anxious when the doorbell rang that evening. My husband and I had friends coming for dinner, and although I had been preparing for their arrival all day, the bell startled me just the same.

  Don, Joan, Mark, and I ate in the kitchen, and our five children were around a small table in the living room. I was still trying to shake off the strangeness that had enveloped me the day before when Joan began talking about a friend from work who was about to retire.

  “They were having a big conference. All these people had been flown into Atlanta, and she didn’t show up for a meeting, which is unlike her. Everyone was worried and they called her fiancé. He went to check on her and found her body on the apartment floor.”

  “She’s dead?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And you used to work with her?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  Joan is kind, intelligent, and introspective, but I especially admire her quiet strength. It’s rare she talks about her personal problems. But now I could see she was struggling to keep her mind on anything else.

  “I can’t stop thinking about it,” she said. “I keep wondering what it must have been like the last moments of her life.”

  “I’m so sorry, Joan. Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Well, it was all by chance. He was with a realtor looking for an apartment. She had been walking her dog and she overheard them talking. She said, ‘Don’t forget my place.’ She was selling her condo to move in with her fiancé. When the security guard called and asked if he should escort the man up, she had said no, explaining she didn’t want him to think she didn’t trust him because he was black.”

  I began asking inane questions of Joan. All the questions people had asked me after my attack came flooding back.

  “What was she like?” I finally said.

  “She edited some of my papers and she was the best editor in the world,” Joan said. “She was always so trusting and, well, I think of that. She wanted to trust him, and there’s a book about this, that humans don’t listen to their gut feelings because they want to be nice. Because maybe deep inside something didn’t feel right, but she didn’t want to be prejudiced.”

  “Yes,” I said. “We do disregard our gut feelings. But it’s hard to know anymore when a fear is based on a gut feeling or a prejudice.”

  The room became silent. “I hate when people prove stereotypes right,” I said, trying to fill the void and at the same time not communicating my idea well at all. “That’s not what I meant. I hate it when people fit into a stereotype is what I wanted to say.”

  I thought of a conversation I once had with a student. “When I’m alone at night in my room and afraid, I imagi
ne a black man breaking through my door, nobody else. It’s as though the media has planted a black face in my head. That’s all I see,” she said.

  The four of us sat, each in our own world. I began to wonder whether all black men feel as though they’re viewed as potential rapists or killers. I had read an article about this by a black man who liked to walk the streets at night and would whistle classical music to put white New Yorkers at ease.

  I thought of Joan’s friend—middle-aged, successful, an important contributor to cancer research, someone who wanted to make the world better, about to move in with her boyfriend, happy—hit with a blunt object, dead. How differently my attack could have turned out had I hit my head harder on the pavement.

  I could see my neighbor’s house out my window, her television lights softly flickering, and imagined my house was made of glass. Who else besides my neighbor can see in? I wondered.

  “Did they catch him?” I asked softly.

  “Yes,” Joan responded. “He came back to the apartment with some friends. He had wanted to steal more.”

  Later that night I couldn’t sleep. I looked online at the Atlanta Journal Constitution. There she was. She was beautiful, competent, successful. I read about the man accused of killing her. He had been convicted before of theft, and suddenly I needed to find his picture. I pulled up article after article and finally, I found him. I looked at his photo. He was not the man who had robbed me. He was twenty-two, black, and handsome. Would I have trusted him?

  I remembered the man at the drugstore, how something deep inside had screamed, You aren’t safe.

  I closed out the screen and put my laptop away. I wasn’t sure anymore what I had been hoping to find or how to feel about any of this. Atlanta slept, people continued to murder, black men were accused of all kinds of crimes, and, on this particular night, I felt alone and unsettled—a sea of people and glass all around me.