The Manson Women and Me
Page 28
I told them it was long before there were general discussions of battered women. There was no talk of syndromes. No talk of “no one is immune.” No talk of partner abuse being an equal opportunity phenomenon. In those days it was straightforward: he was a guy, I was a girl, and every once in a while boys hit girls.
Now it’s possible to look back with relief and see that it wasn’t the beginning of a pattern of relationships. It was a departure from my life’s trajectory, not the norm. Nonetheless, it could have been a dangerous one.
* * *
One of the reasons I tolerated the physical abuse was that I thought it was my fault. I now know this is a common perception of abused women the world over, but I didn’t know it then. Here’s how my thinking went: because of my family’s education, I was better with words, so when we got into verbal sparring I had the upper hand. Therefore, it was unfair of me to keep arguing once he got angry. As my arguments sharpened, his frustration would build and build. By the time I recognized how angry and out of control he was, it was too late. I’d see the impotence in his face and I’d feel terrible. I had no right to hurt him, to unman him in that way. He couldn’t help his feelings, but I could’ve worked harder to control myself. I pushed him too far. I was supposed to be making him feel big and powerful, and instead I was making him feel small and helpless—perpetuating the inequality of our upbringings. He had to fight for everything he had achieved, and it had all come to me easily. Instead of violent boy against articulate girl, it was a war between the classes, at a particularly sensitive time in our country’s history, especially at Cal where we were supposed to be overturning society’s inequalities.
In recounting this, I think about Leslie telling me how the women felt terrible for Manson, for his rejection, for his institu-tionalizations. It was their parents’ generation that did that to him, and knowing that made them feel guilty. Whereas they had come from middle-class neighborhoods with loving families, he’d been abandoned to fend for himself. He used that guilt to manipulate their sympathy.
As Manson pointed to Leslie’s and Pat’s families of origin as their biggest problems, Craig, too, blamed my parents. He said my parents had been too lenient when I was growing up and had not set enough limits, so he was redressing the balance. This was ridiculous on several fronts. My parents were liberal politically, but in terms of setting limits, they were the strictest parents I knew. But even if they had been lenient, what kind of twisted excuse is that to hit someone? I knew that at the time, but I was too preoccupied with my own guilt to even argue with him about it.
What else did we fight about? We fought about sex. We fought about sex all the time. (This, I did not include in my talk with my kids.) My official position was that I wanted to be a virgin when I got married, but the truth was that I didn’t feel ready. (I may have been the last holdout among girls of my generation—I certainly was among my friends.) I was seventeen. He was twenty-one and he’d already had several girlfriends with whom he’d had sex. We did sleep together—on weekends we’d take little road trips and stay in motels—but I held firm to my position. He lobbied constantly. He said if I loved him, I would have sex with him. That’s what people did who loved each other, he said. Though I held my ground, I felt guilty about that, too. It didn’t seem fair to him. I would propose that we stop sleeping together. He said we shouldn’t stop sleeping together, we should keep sleeping together but we should have sex when we slept with each other. And around and around and around we’d go.
So, we argued about sex, we argued about religion, we argued about politics. I was more liberal. There was a new group of young turks on campus who raised issues that I cared about—free speech and academic freedom as well as the right of students to take positions on off-campus public issues such as civil rights and capital punishment. The group was called Slate and it was a precursor to the Free Speech Movement, which came along a few years later. Craig was more aligned with student leaders whose platforms had to do with campus issues. Want a jukebox in the Bear’s Lair (the café in the student union), Craig’s your guy.
And we fought about his hands-off policy toward me in public when we were on campus. I no longer even pretended to buy his reason. As I pointed out to him, John Kennedy married Jackie and women still voted for him.
And then there was the issue of his parents. We didn’t fight about them; we didn’t talk about them at all. He’d always been close to his parents, and we both knew that if he stayed with me he’d have to give up his relationship with them. It didn’t seem fair.
The worst fight we had happened in early June, right before I left school for the summer. I don’t remember what it was about, but I do remember that it fit the pattern. It started as a tiff, built to an argument, and by the time I was aware of his intensity, it was too late. He punched me in the stomach, knocking the wind out of me.
Why did I put up with it? For one thing, and this now seems weird, each time it happened it felt like an isolated incident. My boyfriend hit me . . . not my boyfriend hits me. As I say, no one was talking syndrome.
I never, not once, considered breaking up with him because he hit me. I loved much about him. I loved his husky voice and his wide, hazel-eyed gaze, his athletic good looks. I loved his relationship with his sister and his brother and how proud he was of his parents’ strong marriage. Unlike the frat boys I had dated, he didn’t have even a whiff of entitlement about him. He had every reason to be anti-Semitic and wasn’t. But most of all, I loved that he had chosen me. I was astonished when he asked me out. That’s why his disavowal of me as a girlfriend on campus was especially hurtful. It confirmed my belief that I wasn’t quite good enough.
The night he hit me in the stomach, I ran up to my dorm room. I was crying, so my roommate demanded to know what happened. She was so upset that later, after I’d gone to sleep, she called her mother in Southern California to talk about it. The next morning, her mother called to talk to me. She said I should break up with Craig. She’d had a dream that he killed me. It felt like a premonition.
I thanked her for being concerned, but I told her not to worry. “He’s not going to kill me. It was my fault. I push him too hard. I have to learn when to stop arguing.”
My memory about how my own parents reacted is hazy. I don’t remember that they were particularly upset. Actually, I don’t remember that they were upset at all. Now it seems out of character that parents, especially a father who thought his daughter should have her own career and was a version of an early feminist, would tolerate such a thing. I think maybe there was still a feeling that the rules of engagement were different with couples. Either that or my parents also bought into my belief that I was lucky to have landed him. I also don’t know how much I revealed. I think I told them that he hit me, but I also think that I would have downplayed it. I was reluctant to reveal problems because I didn’t want them, especially my mother, to intercede. All of this is confusing to me now. If our daughter were ever in a relationship with a man who hit her, at any time in her life, my husband and I would not have held back. Maybe I didn’t tell them all of it.
I was never again involved with a man who hit me. Strangely, however, for the rest of my life I’ve thought of myself as the kind of person who couldn’t be with a man who would hit me. I’m pretty sure the people who know me best would assume that too. I’m not suggesting that this relationship became a repressed memory—I was aware that it happened—I just somehow didn’t think it counted. It wasn’t until I started to recall the details through the lens of my inquiries about the Manson women that I wondered if some of my assumptions about myself (and other women) were accurate.
Without articulating it, I’ve believed that women like Pat and Leslie are on a (metaphorical) list of women who could get involved with men who would mistreat them, while I was on a different list—a list of women who would never be involved with such men. Or if a woman on my list did find herself with such a man and he struck her once, she would immediately leave him.
Considering the similarities in our histories, the categories are not nearly as clear as I once thought they were. The two factors that kept me from bolting—believing that it was my fault and the honor of being chosen by him—blended together to produce the glue that caused me to stick, and also prevented me from having a clear-eyed look at our relationship. Both Pat and Leslie talk about variations of these same themes preventing them from seeing Manson clearly before it was too late.
So, am I really on a different list after all? Are any of us? I know, or think I know, that, other than protecting my children, there are no circumstances that would cause me to murder. But my experience with Craig shows that I might have been more vulnerable to some of the steps that led up to that horror than I’d like to admit. The issue, I think, is the question of departures—departures from what one could predict about one’s life, given family history, genetics, and a whole lot of other variables.
In my case, the departure didn’t define me. I can chalk it up to youthful naïveté and turn it into a deeper understanding of what causes abused women to stay in dangerous relationships. For Leslie and Pat, however, their paths crossed with Charlie, not Craig, and the departure defined the rest of their lives.
chapter sixty
WE ARE ALL RWANDAN
July 2007
In 2007, my family traveled to East Africa to visit our daughter who had just finished an assignment for Doctors Without Borders in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The first leg of our trip was to Rwanda, where we hiked to see the mountain gorillas. In describing that experience, it’s impossible for me to avoid hackneyed superlatives—joy, awe, magical—and my sense of wonder extended beyond an appreciation of those magnificent animals. I was filled with appreciation for the humans who made the experience possible.
Among those was the ranger who led with his machete, clearing a path for us by cutting down dense bamboo and giant lobelia and tracking the location of our little tribe of gorillas with a system of walkie-talkies. Our ranger was a shortish, stocky, very dark-skinned man—a classically built Hutu. He could not be identified as such in Rwanda where, because of the genocide, it is now against the law to identify ethnic differences. The country’s motto: “There is no ethnicity here. We are all Rwandan.”
But I’m not Rwandan and our guide’s ethnicity did distract me. I found myself wondering who in his family or among his friends slaughtered Tutsis in the summer of 1994, when the majority Hutus murdered an estimated eight hundred thousand Tutsis and other Hutus considered “moderate.” “Murdered” is putting it mildly. Those people were butchered, day after day after day for three months. When you walk through the streets of Kigali, you see many amputees. They were the lucky ones who escaped with only limbs missing.
On that hike, I didn’t yet understand the story behind those labels. It later occurred to me that my discomfort was not unlike my mother’s with the German woman in Pisa.
Because this country is trying to face its history, there are hundreds of genocide memorials scattered throughout. The main one is in the capital, the Kigali Memorial Centre—a burial ground for some 250,000 victims of the genocide, and also a museum.
As I walked through the museum, an exhaustive display, I realized that this was Manson’s “Helter Skelter” scheme. So many of the elements were there—the labeling, the propaganda aimed at vilifying the Tutsis. (When the Germans and then the Belgians controlled Rwanda, they exploited the ethnic prejudices. The Europeans preferred the Tutsis, claiming their lighter skin and slimmer bodies were aristocratic and more like Europeans’. The Hutus were characterized as subhuman.
Consequently, the Hutus lived under the thumb of the Tutsis for decades, building up toxic resentment. When that bubble burst, the tables were turned and the Tutsis were labeled cockroaches. Glass cases displayed the weapons used—machetes, clubs, and knives. The killings were all horrific and at close range. The next collection included personal accounts by the killers, so many of them expressing the same chilling disconnection, the absence of humanity that both Pat and Leslie had talked about.
“We no longer saw a human being when we turned up a Tutsi in the swamps. I mean a person like us, sharing similar thoughts and feelings,” wrote one man. He described a chilling kind of twinning, writing that it had been as if he had allowed another person to take on his appearance. He knew the killer was himself but the ferocity of that self was a stranger to him. He acknowledged that it was his fault, that the victims were his, he acknowledged his obedience to the directions to kill but he failed to recognize the wickedness of the one who raced through the marshes on “my legs, carrying my machete.”
The Rwandan government puts the number of dead at one million, the estimated number of killers at eight hundred thousand. Were all eight hundred thousand of them monsters? I felt overwhelmed by the enormity of the bloodbath. Once again, as with 9/11, it dwarfed the number of perpetrators I was trying to understand. But there were so many parallels. If I could understand Leslie and Pat, maybe I could understand brutality on such a massive scale. And if I could understand brutality on such a massive scale, maybe I could understand Leslie and Pat.
chapter sixty-one
“YOU TOOK GOD AWAY FROM ME”
Summer of 1962
Craig and I spent the summer apart—he stayed in Berkeley to work as a research assistant, and I went south to work as a counselor at a camp for blind kids in Malibu. As far as I was concerned, the fact that he hit me in the stomach was a footnote; it didn’t change anything. I was as committed to the relationship as ever. At camp, I taped his photo in a prominent place at the end of my bunk. It embarrasses me to recall that my motivation was so the other counselors would know how good looking my boyfriend was. I don’t know if I was in love with him. I do know that I was in love with us as a couple.
It was a hard summer for me. For one thing, the camp had an abundant supply of rattlesnakes. The combination of blind campers and lots of poisonous snakes made for jumpy days and restless nights. On mornings that I’d forgotten to turn our shoes upside down before bed, there’d be a good chance of finding a baby rattler curled up in a shoe. (The babies are more dangerous than adults because they strike wildly and don’t regulate the poison. Later they learn to be judicious with their bites.) So as not to alarm the kids, when we spotted a rattler, we’d yell the code word “jeep” and someone would run to get the maintenance crew to come and kill the snake.
The hardest part of the summer had to do with Natalie, a nine-year-old camper with silky chestnut hair, warm brown eyes, and a malignant brain tumor. After she was diagnosed the surgeons removed as much of the tumor as they could, and in the process severed her optic nerve. In the notes her mother sent along in her duffel bag, she wrote that Natalie had been lethargic at home. For the first few days at camp she was both lethargic and withdrawn, but by the fourth day she was a radiant little girl.
The philosophy of the camp director was to treat the kids as though they could do anything and everything, and Natalie wanted to do anything and everything. In those days, parents of most blind kids tended to be overprotective; it was understandable that Natalie’s parents had even more reason to be worried about her. On family day when I met Natalie’s parents, it was clear they saw her as fragile. But at camp where she had the freedom to make mistakes, she was excited about every milestone, from pouring milk without spilling to learning to swim. Because I knew how few milestones she had left in her life, I had a chronic lump in my throat. As she got happier, I got sadder.
I wrote to Craig frequently, describing camp, the kids, the snakes, but I mostly wrote about Natalie. I was desperate for his support. I wanted to be buoyed emotionally—what I got in return were descriptions of summer weather in Berk
eley, restaurants he’d been to, the friends he had seen. That was as intimate as it got, and even those letters were few and far between. Finally I wrote telling him that I was tired of reading between the lines. If he wanted to break up with me, I wished he would come right out and say it.
One week later I got a one-sentence letter: “Consider it said.” No salutation, no sign-off. I still have the letter. I saved it because I thought that someday I would have trouble believing that someone who once said he loved me could be so cruel. But in terms of cruel, he had just gotten started.
That letter was in early August. I didn’t hear from him again until the end of September when we were back at school. He called on my birthday. My roommate told him I was at the library studying for a test. He knew that I always sat at the same table in the main library, and he showed up there arm-in-arm with a girl, a girl I knew, a girl he had dated before me. They sat across from me. As I quickly collected my things, he passed me a note with a stick figure holding a birthday cake, big smile on his stick figure face: “Happy 18th Birthday!”
I managed to get out of there before the tears started and, as fast as I could, pedaled my bike back to the house where I was living that semester—a big drafty Victorian on the south side of campus. On the way home, I came up with a way to make myself feel better. Craig’s maneuver was infantile, mine was perhaps even more so, but enormously satisfying.
Everyone who was in the house at the time pitched in to make it a party. My roommate served the chocolate cake she had baked that day, a couple of guys bought six-packs of beer, someone brought wine, a girl who was into health made herbal tea, one guy played his guitar. After the party was under way, I brought out two expensive wool sweaters Craig had given me—one for my birthday the year before and one for Christmas. We took turns unraveling them. At first the partygoers were apprehensive. “Are you sure you want to do this?”