by Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl (retail) (epub)
Empty, I say. I thought I’d feel differently, but after I said goodbye and got in the cab, I felt wiped.
That makes sense, Nina says. There was so much buildup. And then, what more could he tell you?
I don’t want this to be a one-sided conversation, I say. How are you doing?
Nina laughs.
Nothing interesting is happening with me right now, she says. How are you feeling now? Are you still feeling empty?
Sort of. Empty and stuck. Ever since I got back, it’s been hard to write.
As a reader, Nina says, I would want to know if your views about the friendship have changed.
That’s a good question, I tell her. I haven’t yet written about that.
Have your views changed?
I don’t know. Friendships are founded on intimate bonds and trust. Sort of like how you and I quickly became friends in the psych ward, fast-forwarding to the deep, serious stuff. So with Mark, it’s as if we’re becoming friends again, forging this deep bond based on this horrible act that he’s afraid to talk about with anyone else. But I’m not going to be friends with Mark. That’d be impossible at this point. He and I are having this intimate conversation, but only because he owes that to me. Do you think you would ever confront your ex about what he did?
No, definitely not. I’ve been thinking about that, actually. I never want to see him again.
. . .
ME: Nina is one of my closest friends. And I feel fortunate—because I have so many great female friendships. But in high school, I remember, I used to pride myself on being friends with guys.
HIM: Trying to be a cool girl has been toxic for any number of people over the years.
ME: Yeah. I tried not to seem like I cared about my clothes and hair and makeup—at least not as much as the other girls. I used to think the other girls were occupied with concerns far less important than Quake and Counter-Strike. [We laugh.] I didn’t even like those games. [We laugh.] But I have such great female friendships now, and a lot of that is because we’re so open with one another. We confide in one another. We help one another through tough situations. I don’t know how I could live without those friendships. You mentioned you don’t have close friendships.
HIM: I’m not in that position. And there are any number of reasons for it. My health has not been great. Mentally or physically. And I don’t—I’ve never been able to make friends with men. I don’t like most of the things that other guys like. I’m not—I find it hard to say this. This is more of a therapist conversation than this kind of conversation. But I got to a point where I just had to shut everything out in order to keep my head above water, and I still find myself doing that, and it inhibits me from—it kills joy. It keeps me alive, but also I have trouble experiencing joy in things, which is not great for socializing.
ME: Have you thought about getting a therapist since we last talked? I know we talked about it briefly before.
HIM: It’s one of those things I probably should do but obstinately won’t do.
ME: Why? It seems like now—it’s obviously your decision. But it seems like it could help.
HIM: Part of it is the expense. I have health insurance but it’s not particularly great health insurance. I’m sure seeing a therapist is fairly expensive. It’s also, I don’t know how comfortable I am—in some ways I feel like I can talk about this with you—like I owe that to you in a way, but I don’t owe that to a therapist. Generally speaking, I don’t know that I really want to have that conversation with a stranger.
ME: Okay. Though a therapist would owe it to you to listen. Maybe you could find a sliding-scale therapist. It might be hard. But you could do it, I think.
HIM: I haven’t explored it.
ME: I Skype with my therapist every week, and it’s been really helpful. I met him in New York six or seven years ago. Before seeing him, I used to be anti— [Server checks on us.]But yeah, I’ve found it helpful. I imagine that these conversations—they’ve been hard for you but also—
HIM: Yeah, I got—I mean, I had a minor depressive episode surrounding—which is fine, but you know, I was sort of reprocessing a lot of this stuff, and that was difficult. Our last conversation didn’t feel like closure exactly, but it was helpful.
ME: What about it didn’t feel like closure?
HIM: Part of that is just me being bad at closure. I sort of have this masochistic streak where I should be punishing myself more.
ME: Your parents don’t know about the assault. You said your sister sort of knows. She knows something happened.
HIM: I don’t know that she knows any details. I think Amber told her that—you’d have to ask Amber what she told her.
ME: I think I told you this, but last time I talked to Amber, she didn’t remember what had happened.
HIM: Okay, fair enough.
ME: And then that was when I thought maybe it wasn’t a big deal. Oh—this reminds me, I actually brought something. [I look through my bag.]
HIM: And now I’m the asshole with no gift. [We laugh.]
ME: No, no. You know what, I think I left—I’ll bring them tomorrow. I have photos for you—ones from high school. But I left them at the hotel with my questions, actually. Circling back, your sister, she vaguely knew what happened. But your parents—and by the way, I would never tell your parents. You have a good relationship with your dad now. What would—
HIM: He would—it would destroy him. It would destroy our relationship.
ME: Again, I’m not going to tell them.
HIM: I appreciate that. In some ways, it’s like a reckoning that never happened. That I just lucked out of. What will be will be.
SO MUCH WORK
Adam asks me if I have a specific readership in mind.
I’d like the book to reach a wide audience, I tell him, but I’m guessing it will attract mostly women. I definitely want it to reach college students.
What is the message, Adam asks me, that you want these young women to walk away with? If it had to be synthesized.
Don’t worry about protecting the guy who assaulted you. Don’t worry about the feelings of the guy’s family or friends. Your job is not to protect them. He screwed up. He messed up those relationships, not you. And yet, here I am, not talking to Mark’s family. Part of that is fourteen years have passed. Part of that is it’d be so much work. It’s so much work to come forward. And yet a lot of people blame the victims for not reporting sexual assault, as if it’s entirely their responsibility to rid the world of rapists.
We get seduced, right? Adam says. We end up identifying with the aggressor. We’ll get angry with the victim because she’s not doing the work of coming forward. It’s her not doing something that’s a problem again. I think of getting into a car accident, that analogy. If my hands are on the wheel, ten and two, and I’m obeying the law and somebody just whizzes through a light and T-bones me, I have to go to the hospital. I have to file the insurance claim. I have to do physical therapy. I have to go to psychotherapy. And I didn’t do anything. Even if the person who caused the accident, even if that person goes to physical therapy, it’s not going to improve my hip. Emotions aside—which this primarily is—but organizing your time, taking your time to talk to his parents, for example: Who cares to do that? It’s work. Why should you have to be the one? It’s very twisted.
. . .
ME: I always thought of your dad as a feminist.
HIM: Yeah, as much as a child who grew up in the seventies can be. He’s really liberal.
ME: There weren’t many progressive men in Sandusky.
HIM: There’s definitely an absence. It’s a pretty conservative town.
ME: Which is why I liked talking with your dad so much. He seemed very open-minded.
HIM: He is. And more so than he would let on when we were in high school—because he was also a principal and had to maintain a reputation, which he would never stop reminding me.
ME: Right, because when he caught you with porn.
HIM: That was the reason he cited for why I couldn’t look at porn. Not just because it’s wrong but because: It would also be bad for your father.
ME: Thinking back to the nonprogressiveness of the men you lived with, I remember feeling disappointed that Jake never reached out to me. Nobody really did.
HIM: I feel like we all fell into this agreement: Let’s not talk about it and it will go away. Which probably is not the healthiest way of dealing with that.
ME: In undergrad, when I met with campus therapists, they often asked if I’d been sexually assaulted, and I always replied, Yeah, but that’s not what I’m here for. Because the assault seemed like such a distraction, which is a weird way of thinking about it. But it did seem like a distraction.
HIM: That had to have been difficult—because you were dealing with other legitimate problems, and this was one more antagonistic thing to add to the pile.
ME: And my first boyfriend, I think he shaped my understanding—or influenced my understanding—of how relationships should go. I don’t know if I ever talked about this, but when he was mad at me, he would get horrible road rage. To the point that I thought he’d kill us. After I broke up with him, in Chicago, he gunned it toward a busy intersection, and I had to lie: I love you, I love you, let’s talk about this at my dorm. And so I didn’t feel like I had a great view of men after everything.
HIM: Understandably so.
ME: How has the experience influenced—so you haven’t dated anyone. Have you had crushes?
HIM: Yeah, I mean, I’ve had a couple situations of unrequited crushes, which typically I end up detonating at some point by writing a really embarrassing email or text message and getting completely shut down.
ME: Coworkers? People in school?
HIM: Usually friends. I mean, how open are you to someone you’ve been friends with for two or three years suddenly sending you an email that’s dumping out their—it’s not the best move.
ME: So you did try and take certain friendships to a new level?
HIM: Yeah. But I’m too chickenshit to do it at a point where I might actually have a chance at success. I don’t know. It’s fine.
ME: Do your parents ever talk about wanting—
HIM: They’ve given up on me. [We laugh.] After they got amazing grandkids from my sister, the pressure was off.
ME: And your brother, is he with anyone?
HIM: He’s not.
ME: How often do you talk to him?
HIM: Pretty much on a daily basis. He’s my only male friend. Well, Carlos is a friend, but we don’t talk as much. I have a good relationship with my brother. We just don’t talk about feelings. We talk exclusively about bullshit.
ME: You told him we were in touch.
HIM: I mentioned a few months ago that I had heard from you. That’s about it.
ME: What scares you, other than somebody figuring out your identity? What scares you the most about this project?
HIM: Obviously it’s not a flattering portrait of me. [We laugh.] Which is fine. There’s a little bit of existential dread into just how unflattering it will end up reading.
ME: So you do plan to read it?
HIM: Yeah, I mean, at this point I’m invested. [We laugh.] Unless you don’t want me to.
ME: No, no, no. Of course I’m okay with you reading it. And if I were you, I’d be curious. I think what’s been interesting for me is that I think of so many good memories of us, and I’m writing those as well. I think that’s what makes it—
HIM: The Greek tragedy aspect of it?
ME: Nuanced—for me, at least. With my first boyfriend, I would not be able to find nuance or be civil or whatever. But now I’m thinking of the friend who raped me in New York. While that friendship meant less—which is probably why I’m not writing too much about that experience—I see a lot of nuance there. Five or so months after the rape, he called me. We were still sort of talking, pretending that what happened hadn’t happened. And we had the same friend circle, which made things uncomfortable. But anyway, he and I were sort of trying to be friends again. He called. He sensed that I’d been feeling off—feeling drastically up and then drastically down. And when I answered, I was slurring my words. I’d just taken all the pills in my apartment. Some of which turned out to be methadone. Who knew that when you order prescription drugs from an online Canadian pharmacy, it’d be methadone? [We laugh.] So he probably saved my life by calling. He hurried over and got me to a hospital. Looking back, I feel torn between anger and gratitude. He raped me. But he saved my life. And then here’s where the mental health aspect figures into this project. My diagnosis—my history of mania and depression and psychosis—it marks me as an unreliable narrator. Even before the diagnosis, I felt like I came across as unreliable. I remember reading the police reports about the situation with my newspaper advisor. I remember reading them back then and thinking, Wow, this girl, me, does not come across as trustworthy.
HIM: But that’s because of whoever the asshole was who wrote that report.
ME: Right. But it’s hard to confront the mental health aspect of this story. Do you think of yourself as an unreliable narrator?
HIM: I mean, in general, a little bit, and about this specific instance: yes.
ME: Okay, how so?
HIM: Well, just— [Server interrupts, tells us the kitchen is about to close.]
ME: Okay, so you do think of yourself as an unreliable narrator.
HIM: I wasn’t quite blackout drunk, but I was close. And my memory about—I have a really excellent memory about particular things, and everything else that doesn’t stick just goes.
ME: You say you were almost blackout drunk, but you do remember a lot of the night. You remembered a lot of it in detail.
HIM: I wasn’t blackout drunk, but I was pretty drunk.
ME: In discussing this, do you feel like an unreliable narrator?
HIM: In terms of second-guessing my own motivations for the claims?
ME: Yeah.
HIM: I’m making the attempt not to be in that regard. The success of that attempt is open to interpretation. I’m doing my best to explain what I remember without twisting it in my favor, because I don’t feel like that’s—that would feel unbecoming. But, yeah—am I doing that unconsciously? Possibly. Probably, even.
ME: You said you didn’t feel like you deserved forgiveness, and maybe you still don’t feel that way. But this, what you’re doing—if there was ever any way to make amends, it would definitely be this. Sure, had this never happened, I’d be working on something else. But still, your participation means a lot.
HIM: I’m glad.
ME: I’m saving you lots of money with therapy, I guess. [We laugh.]
HIM: Why get therapy when you can just wait fifteen years? [We laugh.]
ME: When you talk to your brother—you talk every day. Do you talk on the phone?
HIM: Mostly text.
ME: I’m such a phone person.
HIM: There is almost nothing I would rather do. Talking on the phone is my least favorite thing in the world to do.
ME: Why is that?
HIM: I don’t know exactly. I’m bad at it. Which I think in itself would be a reason for me. But I just don’t like doing it. I don’t know that there’s a rational reason; actually, talking on the phone is stupid for these seven reasons. [We laugh.] But it viscerally is something I don’t like doing.
ME: I know you don’t like talking on the phone, but still: I’m sorry I fell out of touch after our last phone call.
HIM: No, it wasn’t your job to be my social life.
ME: I know. I know. But then I recently noticed that you’d sent me a nice text message and I never replied to it.
HIM: I was never mad about that.
ME: It’s been a busy semester. I was trying to be extra present for students. My student who killed herself, she’s really been on my mind.
HIM: It’s a tragic story, and we’re talking about basically the same issue.
ME: I was
so naive to think she was over the rape. I don’t know if I fully believed she was.
HIM: But at a certain point you can’t make people ask for help.
ME: A lot of the time she seemed happy. She’d joke with me. Meanwhile, I was really worried about her friend who’d been recently raped. She also took my class, and she seemed suicidal. It’s just, the number of rape essays I read every semester. It’s hard.
HIM: I’m sure. As a creative writing professor.
ME: Teaching creative nonfiction, teaching memoir, I learn so much about my students. They really open up. And I’m glad they feel they can trust me with their stories. But it can get emotionally exhausting. I recently looked around my office and realized that all the gifts from former students were from students who’d been raped. One student knit me a scarf. Looking at it recently, I remembered her story: how the guy put something in her drink before he raped her. He must have drugged her—because she woke up with bruises, was partially undressed, and the last thing she remembered was sipping from a single glass of wine. And two other students, they mailed me a vintage typewriter from Portland. Both of them had been raped. One of them came to me the day after she’d been raped. She didn’t want her boyfriend to find out because she thought he’d blame her. Other guys in the frat had watched it happen.
JUST VISITING AN OLD FRIEND
I can’t hold my students’ rapists accountable. And I can’t bring myself to hold Mark accountable. I don’t know what accountability would look like at this point. This project isn’t it. It’s actually helping him. Which is probably why I told him about my students. Because I don’t want him to reach complete catharsis.
I’m at the salon for a root touch-up. And this is how I know I’ve made it. I used to buy drugstore hair dye and hope for the best. It was fun, though, not to know what color I would really get.
My stylist asks about my weekend.
I just got back from Ohio, I say—and immediately regret mentioning it.
What were you doing in Ohio? she asks.
Right now I wish I could do small talk. I wonder, though, what is medium talk?
