by Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl (retail) (epub)
Come on, he says and hands me a shovel. Help me in the garden.
While we dig holes for new plants, I tell him: I regret not telling Mark that I recorded our call.
You told him you’re writing a book, Chris says.
I know, I say. You’re right.
And then, in an effort not to kill any worms, I take breaks to move them gently off to the side.
Sorry, worm, I say each time.
Chris laughs.
You do apologize too much, he says.
In bed, I tell Chris: You also apologize to bugs. I’ve heard you. Just last week, you apologized to dead ants caught in a trap.
That’s probably because I spend so much time with you, he says.
I wake up at 5:00 AM, and I realize what must be so obvious: by never allowing myself to feel angry at Mark, I forgave him easily—but even to say I forgave him insults the very concept of forgiveness. I forgave him when I had no anger, loathing, hatred, resentment, or contempt to overcome.
I schedule an extra therapy appointment with Adam.
Adam asks me, What would it be like to have Mark experience shame and for you to not necessarily do anything?
Do anything as in—
That impulse where you feel like you need to do something. In other words, Now that he feels shame, that must mean that I’m supposed to forgive him. That’s an impulse. That’s a reaction.
Okay, but then this is tricky. Because I don’t know how reactive I’m being. I’ve been reading some philosophy texts on forgiveness. So I don’t know how much of an impulse it is to forgive, if I’m reading about forgiveness. Do you know what I mean?
Adam says, As I’m listening, what I’m hearing is—although it’s good to get more information—is this another way, perhaps, to bypass feeling a feeling?
I think the anger is there. I think I feel uncomfortable saying it’s there—because there is this gendered component.
Am I mansplaining? Adam asks me, and I laugh.
No, you’re my therapist, I tell him. I want your take.
LOCKED IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
For the next two weeks, I print academic articles and staple. Print and staple.
I highlight Prosecutions are most likely to succeed when the victim can be considered as property herself. In the home counties between 1558 and 1599, the only convictions that were imposed were on men accused of raping young girls.
I highlight Saint Albert the Great’s no-means-yes claim: As I heard in the confessional in Cologne, delicate wooers seduce women with careful touches. The more these women seem to reject them, the more they really long for them and resolve to consent to them. But in order to appear chaste, they act as if they disapprove of such things.
I highlight Rape of a virgin, a young woman, was regarded as the theft of her virginity, the property of her father to be used in procuring an advantageous marriage.
So, my nineteen-year-old mind-set was locked in the sixteenth century: at least the assault happened after my dad died—because then I didn’t have to worry about hurting my dad.
I take an ibuprofen. This headache is not going away.
After a memoir about grief and mental illness, and now a memoir about sexual assault, I am definitely doing something light next time. Maybe a children’s book featuring my cats. Wet Nose on My Toes?
Flannery and Bishop, I tell Chris, aren’t mentioned in the book as much as they probably should be.
They won’t know, he says.
But it seems wrong not to include them more, I tell him. Bishop sits on my lap while I write in my room. Flannery sits next to me while I read on the couch. They sleep with us. We are with them all the time.
You can’t include everything, he says.
This book is making me insane, or: I am insane for writing it.
I open my fridge and stare, which is what I do whenever I feel stuck with writing.
I am one of those people who (if there are such people) delay opening their fancier perishable food—kalamata olive hummus, for example—until one day they realize it’s two months expired. There’s a moral there, I think.
It’s time to call Mark.
FINDING EQUIVALENCES
I called Mark, and as soon as I heard his voice, I felt nostalgic for our friendship. I know, I just know, that I was too nice again.
I don’t want to transcribe the call.
I share the phone transcript—of my first conversation with Mark—with Sarah.
Do you notice how he’s always finding equivalences for the two of you? she asks me. It reads like a really underhanded way of minimizing his actions.
I don’t know if I follow, I tell her.
When he said that you were both drunk—without mentioning that only one assaulted the other. And when you said you didn’t think the friendship could survive, he said, I felt the same way. How could he possibly have felt the same way as you about anything in relation to the assault?
Well, that was in regard to the friendship not surviving, I tell her. That makes sense, that he would feel that way, that it couldn’t survive.
What about the part when he said, We were coming from very similar places. We were both incredibly depressed?
Okay, you’re right, I tell her. I hadn’t noticed any of that.
And think about how the conversation ends with him saying Anything I can do. He’s got the power. Again. And I think this process needs unpacking at some point—this impulse that seems to rule over you in the conversation, to move yourself out of the power position. And how he is involved in that.
You’re so good, I tell her. I hadn’t considered him taking power when he said that. I thought, Oh, he’s being really nice.
On one level he is, but there’s the other level—if he is helping you, then he again has the power. To give and withhold. You are the supplicant then. It is really, really, really baroque and convoluted and cool. I think there’s something fascinating about how every time you talk about helping him, I just want to say, Stop, stop, stop, stop. Which I think is great that the reader has that experience. But eventually, I want the memoirist to know at least as much as I do.
At the risk of sounding sentimental, here’s what I’m learning: This book isn’t just about my friendship with Mark. It’s about my friendships with other women.
I wish I’d shared the first transcript with Sarah before calling Mark again.
. . .
ME: I just want to give you a heads-up that I’m taping this.
HIM: That’s fine.
ME: I’ve been thinking a lot about our last phone call. You mentioned that you briefly had a therapist.
HIM: Yeah, for a few months. Would have been after I dropped out of college.
ME: Did you ever tell your therapist about what happened between us?
HIM: No, but I need to tell—I haven’t told anybody. I’ve been sort of locked in my own head on this—because I feel like I need another person that’s not you to talk with about this and I don’t have that person.
ME: Sure.
HIM: There are some things that—it feels unfair. Like, you’re not my therapist.
ME: Unfair to whom?
HIM: I feel it’s unfair of me to ask you to—maybe I’m just overthinking it.
ME: You mean you think it’s unfair for you to talk about it to me.
HIM: Not so much about it, but—I don’t know how interesting my own guilt and my own process with that is from your position.
ME: I recognize that the dynamic here is really messed up.
HIM: The whole situation is a little fraught.
ME: Definitely. So you never told your therapist. A lot of therapists don’t even want to talk to perpetrators. Everyone wants to treat who they perceive as the clear victims.
HIM: Right. I can see that.
ME: And so it actually makes it really difficult to address sexual assault as the giant problem that it is. I was at a party a few months ago, and I found myself saying: Look, I’m not defending ped
ophilia, but . . . Which is not really a good conversation starter at a party. The problem is, there’s not much in place for pedophiles to seek treatment. There was this great This American Life segment on a guy who identified as a pedophile but had never acted on his impulses. He tried to get help from therapists, but every therapist he tried rejected him after they found out what he was there for.
HIM: I’ve never attempted to get a therapist. But it’s tough to, I don’t know—how do you introduce yourself to somebody: So, when I was nineteen, I sexually assaulted my best friend.
ME: So you haven’t talked about it with anyone at all?
HIM: Right. Which is sort of my process on a lot of things.
AND NEVER MIND
Mark said he needs to tell somebody about this—somebody who’s not me. And yet he also said that he likely won’t tell anybody.
And there are so many sliding-scale therapists where he lives. I know, because I just searched for sliding-scale therapists within a fifteen-mile radius of where he works. I could call a few, just to see if they’d be willing to talk with a perpetrator of sexual assault. Then, if they are agreeable, I could share their contact information with Mark.
I imagine what Sarah would say, and never mind. Her cerebral cortex would explode. Mark can make the calls.
. . .
ME: You mentioned last time that your sister knows, or knew, what happened between us.
HIM: She knew other people who were at that party. You’d have to talk to her about the sequence of events, but she—she was mad at me at the time about it. I don’t know how much detail she knows, but she knows something happened.
ME: You and Jake, did you never discuss that night? You guys were living together. But he never talked about it with you?
HIM: No, I mean, obviously he knew that something had happened, but no, we never had a real conversation about it. I cut him pretty much completely out of my life years and years ago.
ME: Last time we talked, you mentioned that if we hadn’t been in that basement—but then I got to thinking, Why was I taken to the basement?
HIM: I don’t know, honestly, offhand. Probably I suggested it, but I don’t know.
ME: I barely remember the house.
HIM: The basement was my room.
ME: I had gone through the rest of the house, because Jake’s uncle was proud of certain rooms. He held open a Playboy for me, and I was like, Cool.
HIM: That sounds like him.
ME: Already, within fifteen minutes of meeting him, he was talking about a woman on a scale of one to ten.
HIM: That also sounds like him. He’s kind of a pig.
ME: I vaguely remember the house, but I remember the first floor, where the party was, seemed pretty big. There were other rooms you could have taken me to. That’s why I’m asking, Why the basement?
HIM: We used to hang out down there because there was a big double sectional couch and I had my computer set up with speakers. So we would hang out down there and get stoned.
ME: You and Jake?
HIM: Not so much me and Jake. But at parties people would bring weed.
ME: I was fall-down drunk, and then to go down all those stairs. That’s what doesn’t make sense. So you’re not sure if you suggested it?
HIM: No, I’m not.
ME: What did the basement look like? I don’t remember if there were posters, or if there was a twin bed.
HIM: I think I had a full-size bed. The way the basement was laid out, you came down a straight set of stairs from the hallway on the ground floor, and then my bed was tucked around an area beside those stairs. If you went down those stairs and immediately turned around, that’s where the bed was. And then in front of the stairs, when you got to the bottom of them, there was that big L-shaped sectional down there and I had my computer desk set up facing it so you could watch a movie from the couch.
ME: I think I had only visited that house the once. That was the only time. You’ve thought about that night, about what happened, over the years. How frequently would you say?
HIM: I mean, it’s the biggest regret of my life. When I get low, I get preoccupied by it.
THE BIGGEST REGRET OF MY LIFE
Good, the assault should preoccupy him.
. . .
ME: What has your dating life been like since then? Do you think it’s affected how you—
HIM: I mean, I really, I basically don’t have a social life. I really have never seriously dated.
ME: Had you been with anyone before that night? Had you ever—
HIM: I figured we would get here eventually, but I’m like the forty-year-old virgin.
ME: So you have never had sex with anyone. Okay, so then—
HIM: Which is also something I don’t really talk about with people.
ME: Sure, sure. I can understand. Do you—I can’t believe these are some of the questions that I’m immediately cutting into. I’m sorry, but—
HIM: I’m sure this is one of those things that will feel healthy in retrospect.
ME: Tie feelings to events. I’ve looked into this. You’re not supposed to recount just events, or just feelings. You’re supposed to do both. That’s supposed to be healthy. Anyway. This is a—whatever, I’ll ask it: What kind of porn did you watch in high school, and did it ever portray nonconsensual sex? And do you think porn affected your approach to the assault? Did it affect why you stopped when you did? I’m thinking about the experience of porn: where you’re masturbating to an image. Do you know what I mean?
HIM: I watched porn, but I wasn’t watching simulated rapes, if that’s what you’re getting at.
ME: I’m not judging. I’m also not trying to be reductive and arguing that porn leads to this, or anything like that. I guess I’m just curious. If you feel comfortable answering. I remember, by the way, when you accidentally stole a Playboy from the drugstore.
HIM: Okay, there are two aspects of that that are wrong. It’s that it wasn’t a Playboy. It was the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. And it wasn’t so much accidental as I just said it was accidental and I really was just stealing it. I went through a little phase when I was a kid. I started stealing little stuff just to see if I could.
ME: I remember us all making fun of you for that.
HIM: I was banned from—it was super embarrassing—but I was banned from Drug Mart until I was twenty-one. I actually didn’t go back in until I was twenty-one.
YOU ALWAYS FIND A WAY TO LASH YOURSELF
At therapy, I tell Adam: Because it didn’t seem a clean, clear-cut instance of rape, I couldn’t see the situation according to good or evil. I think that’s the hard part. That’s what makes me really angry. Because I think of what Mark recently told me—about how ever since he was a little kid, he would steal things, little things, just to see what he could get away with. Obviously, there’s that parallel: What can he get away with? If you keep doing these little things, in some ways, it seems so much more manipulative. I’m glad he didn’t go further, but there’s part of me that thinks, had he gone further, I would have known how to feel. Does that make sense?
So when you have that moment, Adam says, where you think, Knowing what I know, knowing a little bit more about him now, that feels manipulative, is there another feeling for you that goes along with that?
I’m angry at myself. I’m angry that I was so naive. Angry that I let him get away with it. What makes me really angry is that we were really good friends. He also knew I was upset about my dad. And he knew something had happened with my newspaper advisor.
Why is all the anger at you? Adam asks.
You tell me, I say.
I can. But in one respect I wanted to throw a little party here in New Jersey after you said you were angry at yourself. So there is anger. Right? Why you? That Mark betrayed you or turned on you, it’s almost as if that can’t stand alone. But now, When I think about him and this and that, I can understand where he came from. But there’s that third thing where: I’m done being angry a
t myself. You fucking did this to me. I thought I was in a safe place. I was with all friends and I was drunk, and you did this. You’re an asshole. Where is that?
It’s weird to suddenly feel anger about something that happened fourteen years ago, I say. Because anger is usually something you feel immediately. And so now I think, Well, that’s immature of me. Fourteen years have passed.
You’re incorrigible, Adam says. You always find a way to lash yourself.
Because, I reply, I went on for weeks, I don’t know why I can’t feel anger, and now I feel a lot more aware of my anger. I mean, here’s this guy who stole things just to see what he could get away with. Meanwhile, I’ve always worked so hard. And I don’t like that I’m pointing back at me, thinking, Well, I worked so hard. I’m mad that a lot of white middle-class guys like Mark have the luxury to not work very hard and still do okay. It makes me so angry that these guys can get away with so much.
And yet I won’t report Mark to authorities—even though I now have proof.
. . .
ME: So porn then, porn wasn’t—the porn you watched was just basic porn? I don’t even know what basic porn would be.
HIM: Yeah, I got in trouble a couple times in high school about internet porn. I got caught.
ME: By your parents?
HIM: Yeah. [We laugh.]
ME: That’s embarrassing. In the act of watching?
HIM: No, I’d save videos or whatever and my dad would find them. Or they’d be in the browsing history.
ME: So with your dad, did he ever sit you and your siblings down? Did he and your mom ever talk about sex?
HIM: Neither one of them is very good about talking about that. My dad would do the I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed thing, but they’d also guilt-trip me about how he’s a junior high principal. Just like how it was irresponsible of me because it was putting his standing with the school board at risk if anybody found out. Caesar’s wife must be above reproach. That sort of thing.
ME: But they never talked to you about sex?
HIM: I don’t really recall a serious conversation with my parents.
