by Jana Casale
“Welcome! Are you Le-da or Rochelle?”
The fact that there were only two options was further confirmation that there really were no women.
“I’m Leda.”
“Hi, Le-da.” The woman strongly emphasized the two syllables as if the name were split in two. “I’m Stephanie. You’re right on time. We’re all over at that table right there.” She motioned to the lone group of people in the bowling alley at 12:30 on a Wednesday. “So grab yourself a seat, because we’re just about to get started.”
Leda walked over to the group of men. She smiled slightly and folded her arms. It was her best attempt at conveying the emotion: I don’t want to sleep with any of you. I’m with someone, and even if I weren’t with someone, I wouldn’t want to sleep with any of you. If I could leave right now I would, but Stephanie is holding me here against my will, so please just leave me alone.
“Hi, I’m Jeremy,” a tall, lanky man with long, thinning hair said. The crossed arms and slight smile had failed. He reached a hand out.
“Hi, I’m Leda.” She shook his hand. It was her repulsion at having to touch him that would prompt her to so deeply consider the touch itself, its clamminess, its coarseness, its limpness. So few other times in her life would she give a handshake such thought; the best handshakes, she’d hardly notice.
“You’re the first woman here.” He pointed around at the other men, who all seemed as unfortunate as he did. “Lucky you,” he said, leaning in. His glasses were fogged.
Leda laughed politely.
“Well, I guess Stephanie is here too,” he said, nodding to himself solemnly. He was wearing a patterned shirt and was sweating a lot. Leda couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. Being single was hard. Poor Jeremy and your sad day here trying to bowl with strangers to meet a girl.
“Stephanie seems nice.”
“She’s very nice,” he said. “This is my third Meetup with her leading, and she’s great.”
“So have you gone to a lot of these?” she asked.
“I’ve been to eleven,” he said.
Leda tried to think of a polite way to ask how many Meetups it usually took to actually meet someone you liked, but she couldn’t think of a way to word the question, so it grew silent between them.
“Stephanie just knows how to handle herself,” he added.
“Yeah,” she said. It stayed silent for a minute more.
“So what do you do?” he asked.
She didn’t know quite how to respond. For the last four years of her life she would have said, “I’m a student,” and it would have been that easy. But now she couldn’t define herself in three words. She didn’t want to say she was a writer because it wasn’t really true, and she couldn’t say she was a wife or a mother or was working here or there. The strange purgatory of her existence was at least a five-sentence explanation.
“Okay, guys. Rochelle is here,” Stephanie generously chimed in. A heavy girl with black hair and grayish eyes stood beside Stephanie. She too looked disappointed upon seeing the array of awkward men standing together in the bowling alley. Stephanie explained that usually what people do is chat for a few minutes with one person, and then make their rounds to everyone else so that they get a chance to meet everyone.
“There really are no rules, but my rule is that you should at least say ‘hi’ to everyone. Mmm-kay?” she said, looking around the group in the most patronizing way possible to look around a group of people. “Now just enjoy yourselves, bowl, and meet up! Woo!”
Before Leda had time to start to pretend to want to talk to Jeremy again, Rochelle walked up to her and handed her a piece of paper.
“Hey, I’m Rochelle. Here’s my e-mail. I’m not sticking around with all these gross guys, but let’s get coffee or something sometime.”
“Yeah.” Leda smiled back at her and took the paper. “That would be great. My name’s Leda.” She put out her hand. Rochelle shook it and Leda didn’t even notice that her handshake was too strong.
A week later she was headed to meet Rochelle at the coffee shop. John dropped her off on the way to work. She felt nervous. Once again it felt almost like some kind of strange date she didn’t care all that much about. It’s like the entire feeling of my life, she thought, like nothing is happening really, but I’m nervous anyway.
Rochelle was already there when she got to the coffee shop. She looked a little more disheveled than Leda had remembered from the Meetup. She had headphones around her neck and her hair was pulled back loosely.
“Hey, Rochelle,” Leda said, more as a question than a statement, as if she wasn’t quite sure this was the gray-eyed girl she’d remembered meeting among the strange men.
“Hey!”
The girls embraced politely.
“I’m glad you found the place. No one ever seems to know where this coffee shop is when I tell them about it,” Rochelle said.
“Well, we just used the GPS. I hadn’t heard of it before or anything.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” Rochelle asked, blinking in a sort of flurried manner. She looked off to the side a bit.
“Oh, sorry. My boyfriend, John, dropped me off on the way to work.” Leda had an impulse to tell Rochelle about moving to California and about being alone in the apartment and trying to write a novel and how hard it was to feel so much like the way things were.
“Oh, so you have a boyfriend? That’s really lucky,” Rochelle said. “I’ve been chronically single.”
“Oh, well, believe me, I was the queen of chronically single before I met John. Like, so single.”
“Yeah, but what are you, like, twenty-two? I’m thirty-eight. It’s not cute at my age anymore.”
She couldn’t believe Rochelle was thirty-eight. She looked so much younger, and yet, now as she said her age aloud, Leda noticed something in her face. It was just in the corners of her eyes, a sort of looseness and tiredness. It was simultaneous with this observation that she realized Rochelle was strange.
“Thirty-eight really isn’t old,” Leda said.
“My biological clock is ticking. I want a child.” Rochelle paused and stared at her as if somehow she could solve her maternal dilemma right there. Leda felt inexplicably obliged. Answer her, answer her, she thought, and said quickly:
“I’m sure you’ll have a child. Thirty-eight is still really young.”
“Who really knows what will happen,” Rochelle said. “No one can really help me. Do you want some tea? This place has the best tea.”
“That would be great.” Leda started for the counter.
“Oh, I meant I’ll get it,” Rochelle said.
“You really don’t have to do that.”
“No, please. You can get it next time. Passion fruit? That’s honestly their best tea.”
“Sure, passion fruit sounds amazing.” Leda was so disoriented by the strange woman and her gray eyes buying her tea that she really would have said yes to anything in that moment. “Dog turd tea. Sure, love it. It’s my favorite.”
Leda sat down at the table and texted John.
“She’s really weird.”
“How is she weird?” he texted back.
“She just seems weird.”
“Just get through it. You don’t have to see her again after this.”
“Here’s your tea,” Rochelle said, handing her the passion fruit tea.
“Oh my gosh, you really are too sweet.” Leda took it from her gingerly. Rochelle had added cream without asking.
“No, you just owe me for next time,” she said, winking. She sat back down and looked off to the side a bit. “So what does your boyfriend do?”
“He works for Google.”
Rochelle shook her head. “Seems like everybody out here works in tech. My landlord works for Facebook.”
“Oh, yeah? Well, I guess all the jobs are out here and eve
rything,” Leda said. She wasn’t sure if Rochelle had reason to dislike the tech industry, but she decided to try to change the subject. “I’ve never been very tech savvy myself.”
“Me neither.” Rochelle seemed somewhat relieved. Although it was hard to tell what she was feeling, as she was still looking off to the side. “So what do you do, Leda?”
Leda wasn’t nervous to answer this question with Rochelle. It was impossible to fear the judgment of a person with such poor eye contact.
“Well, it’s not really an easy question to answer. I’m an aspiring writer, I guess would be the most accurate thing to say, but of course I would never want to say that I’m ‘aspiring’ because it sounds so pretentious and stupid. But I’m not making money writing, even though I’m trying to be a writer, so I guess that’s really what I am.” She held the tea up as if she were going to take a sip, but she knew it was still too hot to drink. “And you?”
“I’m a playwright and an actress myself.”
“Wow, that’s exciting!” Leda was skeptical of the claim.
“Yeah, I do mostly nonverbal plays that are in dance form. Sort of like interpretative dance. You could say I’m really a dancer more than anything, but I only like dancing in a way that tells a story. And usually that story is something I write. I did a performance at Berkeley a few years ago.”
“Oh wow, that’s really impressive!” It still sounded crazy, but Berkeley legitimized it to some degree.
“Yeah, I can send you a video of it sometime.”
“I’d love that.”
Leda tried to keep the rest of the conversation light and happy. She told a funny anecdote about how she and John went to buy a trashcan at Target, and when they went to pay it was two hundred dollars.
“I didn’t even know two-hundred-dollar trashcans existed!” Leda said. “And I certainly didn’t think if they did they’d be sold at Target. Who knew?”
“Haha, well, I guess I’ll know where not to buy my trashcans!” Rochelle said.
Despite Rochelle being a bit strange and her poor eye contact, Leda was enjoying herself. She did like the passion fruit tea, and it was nice not to be spending the morning alone. John would be home later and they could cook dinner and watch a movie, and it would be a good day. She felt that what she was doing more than anything was building a decent day. Tea with a friend, writing in the afternoon, cook dinner with John, maybe get ice cream. It was sustainable. It was nice. What else is life really than building each day one by one to something that you can tolerate? What is it but slowly shaping time through tea and ice cream? she wondered.
An hour and a half later the conversation started to lull and it was time to go.
“I should get going,” Leda said. “I need to try and get a little writing done.”
“Oh, of course,” Rochelle said. “We should do this again sometime soon.”
“I would really like that.” She wasn’t quite sure whether she would really like it or not. “Let me just step out for a second and call a cab.”
Outside it was bright and summery. The warmth was nice and in it she felt a sense of possibility. It was the same feeling she had felt that first week in the apartment. Things will be okay, she thought.
When she got back inside Rochelle had her headphones on. Leda walked over and Rochelle quickly pulled them off.
“Sorry for the headphones. I just can’t stand listening to them.” She motioned to a group of guys behind her.
“Oh, are they saying something really dumb?” Leda tried to imagine what they could be saying that would have offended her.
“I don’t know what they’re saying, but I just can’t stand surfers.”
Leda looked back over at them. She hadn’t really noticed before, but they were all in wetsuits.
“You don’t like surfers?”
“No, I had a bad experience once.”
“Like on a date?”
“Nope. A group of them raped me.”
Rochelle was looking off to the side as she said it, but Leda would remember her vivid gray eyes staring straight at her. From then on anytime she’d hear the word rape she’d see Rochelle and the brilliant stare that she never really met.
“Oh my god, I’m so sorry.”
“Well, I used to always go for walks on Ocean Beach. I’d usually go early morning, like five a.m. or sometimes six. Just when it was getting light out. It’s really pretty to watch the sunrise, and it’s great exercise to walk in the sand. This one morning I went—it was still pretty dark out so it must have been a little earlier—there weren’t a lot of surfers on the beach yet, just a handful, and I was walking and this group of them were standing together talking. And then one of them yelled, ‘Hey, I want to suck the sand out of your pussy.’ And I didn’t even know what that meant, but I kept walking and didn’t respond or anything. Then I had this really strange feeling like there were people behind me. And you know you get that feeling all the time. I get that feeling like fifty times a day, but usually you turn around and there’s no one or there’s maybe like a mom pushing a baby carriage or something, but I turned around and they were right there. It was five guys. I don’t remember what they all looked like, except one was really short and one was really blond. He had white eyelashes. Then two of them grabbed my arms, and I started screaming and the third one covered my mouth and they dragged me behind a sand dune. There was seaweed and all sorts of sea debris everywhere. And then they held me, and they couldn’t really take my clothes off. It took them a really long time, actually, ’cause I was wearing a romper, and they couldn’t figure out how it worked. It was strange because I knew I couldn’t get away ’cause four of them were holding me and covering my mouth, but I, like, wanted to help them undress me. Not because I wanted them to, but because they were getting so frustrated and the one guy kept going, ‘Fuck, fucking bitch. Fuck.’ And it’s like your brain doesn’t really recognize what to do with someone raping you, but your brain does know the circumstance of taking your clothes off, so it was this really weird feeling of knowing this thing about what should happen but not wanting it to happen. And then I just started crying and shaking. And then they all fingered me, which is something I hate, so in a way to me that was the worst part. Like, I never let guys do it to me so for them to do it…it was this horrible violation of everything about myself. I can’t really explain it. And the one guy was the one who really raped me. The blond one who I think said that pussy sand thing, although I don’t really know for sure because I didn’t really look at him when he said it. Another one, the short one, kind of tried, but I think he was hesitant or something ’cause he only did it for like three humps and then he stopped. And all the others kept screaming all this stupid macho crap like ‘Yeah, fuck yeah. Ride it,’ but they had like their dumb surfer inflections so it was even more awful. Then one of the ones that had been holding me jerked off on me. I think he was trying to come on my face, but he missed kind of and came on my neck and I could feel it run into the sand. It was gross. And then they just said something to each other in these low, muffled voices. I couldn’t really hear ’cause I was crying so loud, and then a few seconds later I just felt them all let go of me at once, and they ran off super fast. One of their wetsuits was still half off. And then I got dressed and had to walk back to my car like that. It was really scary too ’cause I was just afraid they would come back. There was no one around besides other surfers, and I wasn’t going to ask any of them for help. I got to my car and I was okay. But now, you know, I just can’t stand surfers.”
Leda didn’t know how to respond. The same feeling of unease overtook her that she’d felt watching the raccoons being skinned alive. “I’m so sorry. That’s just so awful…Did you report it?”
“Yeah, they did a medical exam and took down the information. It was on the local news. They never found the perpetrators.” Rochelle blinked in a flurry again.
�
��When was this?”
“Two years ago.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what, I will never go somewhere where there aren’t any women ever again. It’s a bunch of men on a beach. Women shouldn’t go there.”
“But it’s not your fault you went for a walk on the beach, Rochelle.” Leda’s phone started buzzing. “Oh shoot, the cab’s here. Do you want me to cancel it and call another?” She wasn’t sure how to handle the situation, but leaving Rochelle right as she’d confessed her rape didn’t seem right.
“Why?” Rochelle said. Her demeanor brightened. “We can do coffee again next week!”
That night Leda relayed the story to John.
“Do you think she’s telling the truth? It seems so weird that someone you just met would suddenly tell you she was raped,” John said.
“It seemed true. I mean, that whole thing with the headphones and everything. I mean, who would do that?”
“It would be really messed up.”
“I feel really bad, but I don’t really want to hang out with her anymore. I know that’s awful, but there’s clearly something wrong with her. I mean, who tells you about their rape when you hardly know them? It’s so crazy, right? I have to go, though. I can’t just not see her again after she told me all that.”
They did a Google search of Rochelle and the incident. An article came up.
“San Francisco Woman Sexually Assaulted by a Group of Surfers on Ocean Beach,” it read.
“That has to be it. I feel so bad.” She read the article. It didn’t say Rochelle’s name, of course, or even really describe much about her other than saying she was a local playwright. The details were vague. It wasn’t explicit enough to tell you how horrible any of it really was. It made it seem like something had just sort of happened on the beach. If you’d just read it in the article you’d think it just manifested itself, Leda thought. As if no man’s mind could be that evil. As if no man would try to suck the sand out of your pussy.
“Maybe I’m wrong about her,” she said as she finished reading. “Maybe she just needs a friend and doesn’t have anyone to talk to. I should at least give her a chance.”
