by Joanna Scott
Feet bare, jeans down. He pushes her backward, back farther, back through a doorway and across a hall, back into a room until she tumbles onto a bed. He falls over her but catches himself with his hands and peers down as though from a great height.
If he is using her, then she is using him. Looking up at the professor, she could almost convince herself that there’s nothing wrong with this, as long as the satisfaction is mutual. Yet now that it is too late to refuse him, she wants to refuse him. All her strength goes into the effort of escape. She tries to lunge out of his reach, but he’s got his hands inside her shirt again, and he manages to hold her in place while, with a single swift motion, he turns the shirt inside out and pulls it over her head. At the same time he nudges her legs apart with his knees, and after an awkward series of jabs he’s tearing into her.
His face is hidden over her right shoulder, which he presses down with a hand that is too soft to be so strong. His other hand is rubbing her left breast. One of his knees is on her thigh, pinning her to the bed. When he bears down, his weight squeezes the breath from her lungs. She can’t breathe. If she can’t breathe she can’t think. That’s good. Without thinking, there can be no memory. Only the thudding of the headboard against the wall.
“It follows,” Saint Augustine explained, “that the very thing which by its presence causes us to forget must be present if we are to remember it.”
What is the professor trying to say?
He’s telling you, in case you hadn’t realized, that you’re something special. My love, he calls you.
The only word Nora hears is my. The assumption of possession. A word that should repel her, she knows. But her response is like this effort—raising her pelvis to push him away only makes the grinding fiercer, the sensation more intense. Wanting to belong to no one only makes her more dependent. She belongs to him. That’s good.
But you see, Nora, he’s far more experienced than you, with precise ambitions and self-control. How artfully he thrusts, once more, a strong, groaning thrust, and then withdraws, spilling onto the sheet, an accomplishment that instantly becomes in Nora’s mind the distinguishing factor. Because of this, the professor is nothing like the boy who attacked her when she was fifteen. That boy was under the delusion that he had to hurt Nora Owen. The professor would never set out to hurt anyone. He’d found a willing partner for a mild spring afternoon. She belonged to him only for the minutes he remained inside her. Now she is free to go.
He doesn’t actually send her away. Lying beside her on the bed, spent and pleased with himself, naked from the waist down only, he makes an effort to demonstrate affection. As he reaches across her to turn on the lamp, he tells her she’s beyond wonderful. He tells her she’ll get an A on her final essay, though she has yet to write it. He chuckles to indicate that he’s only kidding. He remembers he left the pot of water to boil and jumps up in a panic, pulling on his boxers as he stumbles toward the kitchen.
Nora looks down at herself, trying to see what the professor saw. Her body, slick and veined with blue in the lamplight. The curls of pubic hair. She notices that the thigh of the leg turned outward is broader than the other. She waits for the professor to return. She hears water running, a toilet flush. After a few minutes she goes into the living room and pulls on her jeans and shirt. Deliberately, she leaves her underwear on the floor.
When he appears again he is dressed in gray sweatpants and a red muscle shirt that must be new, for it still has the creases from the package. He settles into a chair and rubs his arms as though to warm himself. He asks, “Now where were we?” He says it in jest, but there is also something different in his voice, an inkling of annoyance, which Nora interprets as impatience. He says nothing about dinner. As far as she can tell, he’s just waiting for her to leave.
He reminds her how the turn of the afternoon’s events came without warning. The day was supposed to be ordinary. He’d gone out for a quart of milk and had been planning on staying up late to grade papers. He has forty papers to mark for another class. He’d promised his students he’d have them done by tomorrow.
This is his most obvious hint—he has work to do, and it’s time for Nora to leave. Okay. So long. She doesn’t know what to call him. He’d wanted her to call him Eric, but that was before.
He accompanies her to the door and kisses her softly, with a lingering wisp of passion meant, she knows, to signal an end. They’ll not meet again, except in class. He won’t be caught carrying on a romantic relationship with a student. He doesn’t want to be in any relationship. He is a puckish, independent sort, fun-loving but ultimately solitary.
“Good-bye, my love.”
This time it’s the last word that she hears. Love used in mockery of love. The sound of the word, emptied of meaning, fills her mind as she walks through the evening darkness back to campus. Love. Love. Love. She doesn’t even look when she crosses the street and doesn’t jump when a blue Ford Escort swishes toward her. Go ahead, smash her. It would be a perfect ending. But the Escort veers around her with an angry honk and disappears down the block, leaving Nora to continue on her way.
The dorm room is empty. Nora takes her time showering—a long, hot shower to wash off the wintry smell of pine—and then she sits at her desk and picks up a pencil. Catching sight of her reflection in the mirror, she’s struck by how composed she appears, poised and focused, as though she’s completed one necessary task and is ready to start on another.
WHAT DON’T YOU WANT to forget? What don’t you want to remember? What exists in your mind without consequence, like empty suitcases taking up space in an attic? A dusty old volume in your father’s house: The Natural History of Selborne. What else don’t you need to know? Do you really need to know who George Borrow was? Do you care what happened to Hajji Baba of Ispahan?
Gusts rattling the leaves. The soil is dry for this time of year, but the prediction is that a steady rain will begin to fall the next day. Two crows in a tree, waiting for the rest of their flock. What matters? Company. One stone on top of another.
“Why didn’t you show up at work? I went to look for you. Nora, what’s wrong?”
“I had that lab report to finish.”
“You sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re really sure?”
“Really.”
“Night, then.”
“Night.”
You, Sophie, can’t know how much I appreciate your concern. Our hours of schnapps and pot and conversation. And you, Max. And Mom and Dad. Mom? Yes, dear? Nothing.
Dad is off in Indonesia exhuming pottery shards and bones. Mom is living with Gus in New York. But even if they were all here in the room with her, Nora wouldn’t know what to say.
When, therefore, the memory loses something—and this is what happens whenever we forget something and try to remember it—where are we to look for it except in the memory itself?
Remember?
She remembers that Edward I. Koch is mayor of New York. She remembers that Leonid Brezhnev is president of the USSR. She remembers Saint Augustine’s theory of parts. The first half of the sentence disappearing into the meaning of the second half. Experience disappearing into dream. And then, in the morning, the whole page is blank, everything is new, and you can start all over again, from scratch.
SHE HOLDS A TORN PIECE OF FABRIC that she’d found between her dorm and the quad. Lengthwise, she estimates, it is about three inches. Two inches across. The pattern consists of colorful oblongs, jelly beans in yellow, orange, lime green, pink, purple, and teal. As she waits, she folds it in half, then in half again and again until she has a cushion of fabric the size of a pea, and then she unfolds it, flattens it against her leg, and begins all over again, keeping her eyes on her hands’ activity while students skip up the stairs into Packard Hall. The cloud cover sinks toward the ground under its own weight. Fat, scattered drops leave stains on the concrete squares of the walk. The music of a violin can be heard through an open window of an
upper-floor rehearsal room. Grackles poke around in the newly seeded grass beside the steps. A flag furls and flattens with a snap in the wind. Behind the building, a truck beeps a warning as it backs up. A girl heading toward the door drops an unwrapped straw on the step and scoops it up before Nora can retrieve it for her. Nora pulls a few stray threads free from the piece of fabric. Red threads tipped with black. She folds and refolds, unfolds, smooths the fabric against her jeans.
She recognizes his shoes first—brown loafers, polished and comfortable—and then his voice. She can tell from the forceful emphasis in tone that he is talking to a colleague rather than a student, though she can’t make out the content of the conversation. When she hears the pause in his speech, she knows without doubt that he has seen her sitting there on the step. For this brief moment he is trapped between what he wants to say and what he will say. He is not used to feeling awkward. This in itself gives Nora some satisfaction. She has made him feel something he is not used to feeling. The space between intention and action. The blank space between one word and the next when we can’t be sure what will happen, when the chaos of memory threatens the coherence of understanding. When it’s possible that we might be held accountable. When anything is possible.
The pause lasts long enough for his colleague, a woman, to notice the break within the phrase and to coax him on with a Hmm? It doesn’t last long enough for him to fill the silence with Nora’s name.
As he was saying.
She folds and unfolds her piece of fabric. She watches a fat raindrop melt into the pavement. She watches the grackles bob for grubs. She hears the whirring sound as the electric chimes in the tower prepare to ring the hour.
AND NOW, at last, it’s Saturday night, and Nora lies in her bed beside Max, who sleeps soundly, stretched prone, his head framed by the arc of his arms, his skin dimpled around the junctures where the ribs meet his spine. His breath moves through pursed lips in gentle whistles. He is exhausted by sex. She is exhausted by confession. She hadn’t meant to tell Max about what happened at Professor Harrison’s on Tuesday, but somehow he’d drawn it from her, motivated by the suspicion that she’d generated with her reticence over the past four days. He’d sensed something was wrong and had even guessed the nature of her secret, if not the details. He couldn’t make love to her freely and completely if he was tense with suspicion. So she’d told him everything she could allow herself to tell.
“He must have forced you,” Max said quietly.
“It was my fault.”
“It was his fault.”
“Blame me.”
He refused to blame her. He knew her too well to blame her. He’d never blame her—a promise he wouldn’t be able to keep. It might take months, even years, but at some point he would think about what happened, and he’d blame her.
But for now he loves her and can speak the word straight—love—unshaded by doubt. He would never suspect that she’s a fraud. Twining his fingers with hers. Let’s be together forever.
Her sweet, forgiving lover. If only she could have included in her confession the relevant facts. Watching him sleep, she imagines what she wished she could have told him: not the story of last Tuesday, but, rather, the story beginning that afternoon four years ago when she was walking home from school through the cemetery and the Baggley boy ran up to her from behind, smacked her on the head with a hollow plastic bat, and then jumped on her and raped her.
She would say it boldly, confidently. Rape. Noun and verb. She imagines Max’s astonishment, and even more, the dismay he would express when it dawned on him that Nora had waited so long to tell him about this. She’d have to explain why she’d kept the truth a secret, why secrecy was her first, spontaneous response and why, after a week had passed, secrecy became absolutely necessary.
You let a guy like that go free, he’ll do the same again. He’ll do it again and again until someone comes along who has the guts to make an accusation.
Nora imagines Max’s anger—really just frustration, knowing that his girlfriend had been harmed. She couldn’t fault him for wanting to protect her. She could only try to make him understand.
Listen, Max.
Why didn’t you tell me?
I am telling you now.
You lied to me. You said you were, you hadn’t...
I never said that. Sophie said it, not me. I’m trying to explain. If you’ll listen. Are you listening?
She was raped by a sixteen-year-old boy—a sick, gross kid who didn’t know what he was doing. The smell of him. The sounds he made. Her face in the grass. Afterward he’d scrambled over the stone wall bordering the cemetery and run like a little boy who’d broken a window with a baseball. She had continued to lie there until it started to rain, and then she, too, went home, though she walked slowly, limping slightly, for she’d turned an ankle trying to escape him.
At home she stood in the shower until the hot water ran out, then she planted herself in front of the television. The puzzles of Jeopardy! had a soothing effect. By the time her mother returned home, Nora was calm enough to pretend that nothing had happened. Coward that she was. Don’t ask her to explain.
He lived near her—across the street, a few houses down. For years she’d seen him wandering the neighborhood at night, shining his flashlight into mailboxes. Sometimes he’d use a sharp rock to make long scratches along the side of a parked car. He was the kind of boy whose usefulness the other children were taught to appreciate, the way they were taught to appreciate their nightmares, his example demonstrating the scope of human variation, preparing them for the unexpected.
Creep was the name the children used when they were calling to him. The Baggley boy was the phrase they used to identify him in their conversations. But their cruelty toward him was restrained simply because he had a younger brother who, though reserved, was an all-around good kid, smart and cute and promising on the lacrosse field. As long as the younger brother had potential, the older brother would be tolerated.
No one would ever know what the older Baggley boy did to Nora Owen. She missed only a single day of school and then resumed her life. A social studies unit on South America; algebra; French; filched cigarettes; intramural basketball, though she had to sit out two games because of her sprained ankle. Six days passed. Her period began on schedule, with cramping that was blessedly normal. Everything was normal. The arguments with her mother about money. The gossip with her friends. The crisp fall weather.
And then little Larry Groton had to go walking alone through the cemetery. And instead of minding his own business, he stopped when he saw the Baggley boy hunting for frogs in the reeds around the pond. Is that what happened? He had to strike up a conversation. Is that what happened?
Watcha doing?
Mmm.
Huh?
What?
You know me. I’m Larry.
Yeah.
So watcha doing?
Dunno.
Looking for frogs?
Mmm.
Did you catch one yet?
Mmm.
Where is it?
Mmm.
Can I see?
Naw.
Why not?
Ummm.
Why not? Maybe you didn’t catch a frog. I bet you didn’t catch any frogs, not even one.
Two boys, one twice the weight of the other, seven years older, with a mind that didn’t understand the concept of morality, though no doctor had been willing to treat him, since no exact diagnosis had yet been determined. A boy who couldn’t have been uglier. Fat, grayish lips. Fat fingers and toes. Fat arms. Fat butt.
Fatso!
Larry, don’t. You should know better.
Creep!
What happened next? Larry would have experienced it either as unreality slowly unfolding, as in a dream, or as a real sequence in real time. Whatever the quality of impression aroused by experience, Larry would have understood that he was in danger. He was a small child for his age, and though he knew himself to be a fast runner
, he wasn’t fast enough.
And what about the Baggley boy? How much did he understand? Nora could guess what was going on inside that fat brain of his. The way memory exists within forgetfulness. Remembering that he couldn’t remember what he’d done wrong. You dummy. Fatso. Creep. Anything he ever did was wrong. He understood that in order to be himself, he had to keep doing wrong. Last week he’d done something wrong. He’d done it because he was who he was. Creep. It was wrong to jump on a girl. It was wrong to grab this little boy by the neck. Of course it was wrong. That’s why he did it. If wrong is what you always are, then wrong must always be what happens next. He couldn’t remember what, exactly, he’d done wrong to the girl, but his action had left behind an impression, like the stain of a raindrop on concrete. He remembered the forgetting. Before he forgot the remembering, he’d have to do it again.
He did what he did to little Larry Groton because he’d done what he’d done to Nora Owen. It was as simple as that. He was someone who could only ever do wrong. He was a creep. He was ugly and fat. Fatso. That’s who he was. That’s what he’d done. A boy lying with his face in the grass. He’d done that. The smell of wet leaves and pine needles, mud, pond water. The hissing of the wind. A half-grown boy who would never move again. He’d done that. He’d done it because he remembered the forgetting. Make no mistake—he’d meant to do it. And later when the police came to talk to him, he would remember that he’d meant to do something, but he wouldn’t remember what the something was until they told him.
Is that what happened?
Creep.
Run, Larry. Or even better, stick to the road. Walk around the cemetery instead of through it. Start from the beginning and change the sequence. Save your life.
PART IV
That Place
Or else Larry Groton didn’t even exist—then the Baggley boy couldn’t murder him, and Nora wouldn’t bear some responsibility for his death. Maybe the Baggley boy never attacked anybody in White Oak Cemetery. Let’s say Nora grew up without ever being assaulted. After completing her graduate degree, she found work in public school administration. She fell in love, married, and moved to Philadelphia. And eventually she came home to take care of her mother, who was battling cancer.
