The Cotton Queen

by Pamela Morsi

  Greg was sleeping on the dining room floor. Robert was sitting in front of the TV with a beer in his hand.

  “I’m going to call my mother to come and get me,” I said.

  “The phone’s dead,” he answered. “You’ll have to walk down to the Mini Mart.”

  The store was four blocks away. We had no cars, Greg’s BMW was in the driveway, but I didn’t even ask to borrow it. I walked.

  At the pay phone, I made a collect call.

  “Babs, it’s me.”

  “Hi, honey, I’m so glad you called,” she said. “How are you feeling? How’s my little grandbaby.”

  Her warmth and welcome, the tenderness and care in her voice, broke through the iciness surrounding my heart. I began to cry.

  “Come get me, Mama,” I managed to mutter.

  When I got back to the house, it was locked. I had no key. Robert, Greg and the BMW were gone. My suitcases were piled up by the front step. I sat down on the front porch and waited almost five hours on that cold winter night before Babs arrived to rescue me.

  I never saw Robert again.

  BABS

  THE RAPE CRISIS Center was, in almost every way, a surprise to me. I had not imagined that there were so many people; thoughtful, knowledgeable people, eagerly waiting to help women, children and men who’d been abused. And the gamut of things that they were willing to do to help was impressive. They would stay with victims in the emergency room, stand beside them while they talked to police. They would help them get back to living at home, or if they were at risk in that place from their spouse, family members or neighbors, they would assist them in finding a new, safe place to live. They made sure the victim, and sometimes her whole family, had access to appropriate counseling, both immediately after the attack and later, if the aftermath overwhelmed her.

  They gave public education programs on sexual assault to schools and civic groups, giving real life information about prevalence, prevention and protection. The organization made it a goal that every person in the community had the most up-to-date information, free of recriminations, myths and prejudice.

  What drew me most strongly was the hotline. Twenty-four hours a day, trained volunteers manned the phones. A person who’d been attacked could call anonymously and talk to someone. They could verbalize their horror, their terror to another human being, without any fear of the long-term ramifications of doing so. How wonderful that must be, I thought to myself, to be able to just talk to someone. I’d carried the burden of silence for almost fifteen years before I was able to speak about it. Keeping those words inside me had been, in some sense, as soul killing as the rape itself.

  “All our volunteers go through a very rigorous training,” Analisse, the director told me. “And it’s not the kind of job that anybody can do. So when we’re trying to raise money and awareness, we’re also trying to attract those people who can be just right on the phones.”

  I nodded and wrote that down. I was taking extensive notes on the requirements of their promotional campaign.

  “Many of our volunteers have been through this themselves and know very well what the clients are going through,” she said.

  I blanched and gave a hasty glance through the office glass at the main work area.

  “Some of these people were victims themselves?”

  Analisse smiled. “I don’t think you can tell who they are by looking,” she told me.

  She’d misread my sudden panic. I was suddenly nervous that someone might suspect me.

  “I suppose I thought that most of these volunteers were...social service workers or counselors or...or...professionals of some kind.”

  “Some are,” she assured me. “Anyone with the desire to help will find some much needed job to do.”

  “But many of these people are victims themselves.”

  “We prefer to be called survivors of sexual assault,” she said.

  I wrote that down.

  “It’s just...everyone seems so upbeat,” I said. “You’d never know.”

  Analisse took a deep breath. “That’s what we’re working toward, I suppose,” she said. “If we could prevent every sexual assault, we would. Failing that, we want the people who’ve been through it to know that they’re not alone. That what happened was not their fault, they don’t need to feel guilt. And that they have control of their lives. Their attacker had that control for a few moments or a few hours, but doesn’t control them now. That, on its own, is a lot to be upbeat about.”

  I nodded thoughtfully.

  “Will I need to go through this training that you offer?” I asked her.

  She hesitated a long moment. So long I began to get nervous. I began tapping my pencil against my collarbone. When I realized what I was doing, I stopped.

  “Yes, I think you should,” she said, finally. “It will give you more insight into what we do and what we need. You’ll get familiar with supportive, nonjudgmental language and the basic first aid for those who’ve been attacked. Yes, I think you’ll have to take the course.”

  “Certainly,” I said, nodding.

  My fear of it warred with anticipation of it. Perhaps I could learn something while revealing nothing. That’s not what happened.

  I did fine in the classroom. I took copious notes all during the four-day information sessions. Little information lightbulbs were turning on so quickly in my head, I was probably in danger of some inner power shortage. Virtually all of the terrible, life-altering, happiness-crushing effects I’d suffered through had been typical, normal, even predictable. And they would have been so much easier for me to understand had I known that.

  Even when other members of the class shared personal experiences, I managed to keep my thoughts and my memories hidden inside. But on the final day, we participated in some mock phone interviews. Some of us pretended to be callers, while others answered the phone and practiced hotline listening response.

  Since I was not going to be working the phones, I was picked to be a caller and given an identity and an incident on a five-by-eight card. I was to be Sally, a twenty-two-year-old single mother who’d been raped by an acquaintance at a community gathering. The perpetrator was known and well liked by family and friends. He was an upstanding family man with a lovely wife and two children, his youngest a playmate of Sally’s own child.

  I began my bit of playacting without much trepidation. I said the things that we’d learned to expect victims to say. The person training for the hotline did her part to be an encouraging, supporting listener. As I went on, I got more into the character. I began to feel what she must be feeling. I got to saying what she might actually be saying.

  “He’s a horrible man,” I said into the phone. “But nobody knows that. Nobody will believe it. If I tell, everyone will think that it was me. That I led him on. That I was trying to ruin things for his wife, for his family. That I let him think that it was all right. That I wanted it. At best they’ll think that I was too stupid not to recognize what he was, too stupid not to protect myself.”

  “It’s not your fault,” she responded correctly. “I’m just so glad that you’re safe. I’m so sorry that this happened. You did the best that you could do at the time.”

  “I should have done something else,” I insisted. “I should have never opened that door. I should have never got friendly with those people. I should have stayed in McKinney where I belonged instead of trying to venture out into the world. Instead of trying to stand on my own.”

  I looked across the table at the other trainee on the mock telephone and I realized that I had somehow shifted unexpectedly from Sally’s pretend rape to my own very real experience.

  “I...I’m sorry,” I blurted out, realizing that I’d inadvertently revealed feelings that I’d so carefully kept hidden all those years. “I didn’t mean...”

  “It’s okay,” she said to me, more forcefully. “I’m so sorry that this happened to you, but you are very, very brave to come forward to say so. You are going to be better
from saying this. And we are all going to be better for having heard it.”

  I knew she was right.

  After I put the phone down, Analisse came up to me and hugged me.

  She wasn’t the only one to openly show support and affection. Every man and woman in that room was there for me. And didn’t hesitate to say so.

  “I kind of thought you were one of us,” she admitted. “And no, I don’t think it’s because you have some kind of mark on your forehead. It’s just that I’ve dealt with plenty of business people on campaigns in the past. And I just knew from the concern and intensity of your interest that this was more than just business to you.”

  “Yes,” I admitted finally. “It is more than just business.”

  All of this was on my mind the evening Laney called me from Houston and asked me to come get her. I hardly hesitated long enough to go to the bathroom. I grabbed my purse and was out the door.

  I’d known that things were not right with Laney and Robert. That unsettling feeling I’d had about them almost from the day they’d married, had only intensified with time. Even when she’d called me with the exciting news that she was carrying my first grandchild, I got the sense that things were not as they should be.

  Not that I could discuss this with Laney. Our relationship, as it had panned out, was not one with a great deal of sharing or trust. I blame myself for this. Or at least, I lay the blame, in part on my own secrets so closely kept so long. I knew that Laney loved me, but I was fairly certain that she didn’t understand me. And that was exactly how I had always wanted it. Protecting her from the ugliness that I’d experienced was what a mother should do, I was certain.

  But I couldn’t protect her from the ugliness that she found on her own.

  When I got to her house in Houston she was sitting on the porch with everything she owned packed into three suitcases. Heavily pregnant and shivering from cold, I wanted to take her to a doctor to have her checked out.

  “Just take me home, Babs,” she said. “I just want to go home.”

  Laney strapped herself into the passenger seat and I tucked a blanket around her. She was sound asleep before I got six blocks away from her house. She slept much of the way home. I forced her to go into a restaurant for dinner in Huntsville. But she had very little to say to me. I didn’t press her for details. She’d talk when she was ready.

  We arrived in McKinney in the middle of the night.

  “We’ll bring this luggage inside in the morning,” I told her. “Let’s just go in and go to bed.”

  Laney slept all night and most of the next day.

  I brought the suitcases in myself and dragged them upstairs into the hall in front of her room. I brought her dinner, but she wouldn’t get out of bed to eat it.

  When the next morning arrived and she still hadn’t stirred, I went into her room and opened the curtains.

  “Leave me alone,” she moaned from the bed.

  I felt sorry for her, but I was still her mother.

  “Laney,” I said. “If this was just you, I’d let you lie in bed for as long as it takes. But it’s not just you. So, you are going to get up, wash up, come down to breakfast and take a walk around the block.”

  She gave me the evil eye.

  “Get out,” she said. “I’m tired. I need to rest.”

  “That baby inside you needs food and fresh air.”

  Her answer was to roll over and pull the covers up over her head. I stood looking at her for a long moment and then walked over and jerked them off.

  “Get up, Laney!” I insisted.

  “Go away!”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “You always think you know what’s best for me,” she snarled. “But you don’t, Babs. You don’t know anything about me.”

  “Maybe not,” I agreed. “But I know a few things about your baby. If you don’t take care of yourself, it’s your baby who’s going to suffer.”

  “My baby is fine,” she insisted.

  “But he won’t be if you don’t start thinking about him first,” Babs said. “Believe me, this is one of the things I learned the hard way.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Marley.”

  Laney eased up on one elbow, hair wildly tousled, but eyes clear.

  “Marley? My brother, Marley?”

  “Marley died because I didn’t take care of myself,” I told her.

  Laney grabbed for the covers once more. “Don’t be so dramatic,” she said. “Marley died of a heart defect.”

  “Yes, he did,” I told her. “But he might have been stronger, he might have had more strength to fight for his life if I’d taken better care.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “It’s true,” I said. “I didn’t want Marley. He was unplanned and a shame and embarrassment to me. I hid my pregnancy. I didn’t eat right, I wore girdles. I tried every way I could think of just to miscarry. When he was born weak and sickly, I thought it was a miracle. But it wasn’t. It’s what happens when a baby is deprived in the womb.”

  She sat up then, staring at me.

  “I heard from the Hoffmans that you were pregnant when you got married,” she said.

  I nodded. “I guess my secret wasn’t as safe as I thought.”

  “But even if you were embarrassed,” she said. “I can’t believe that you didn’t want Acee’s baby.”

  I stood there for a moment that seemed like a lifetime. There are things in every mother’s life that she hopes never to share with her daughter. This was one of them. I didn’t want her ever to know, but somehow it now seemed important, for her own sake and the sake of my grandchild, that she did.

  “Marley wasn’t Acee’s baby,” I said.

  “What!”

  Laney’s mouth dropped open, her expression incredulous.

  “Who? How? What?”

  “I was raped,” I answered to all three questions. “When we lived in Dallas, I was raped.”

  My daughter just continued to stare at me, completely dumbfounded.

  “I can’t believe that it came out that way,” I said. “I never meant for you to know. I’ve kept the whole sordid story inside me for twenty-five years.”

  She nodded. “And you never told anyone?”

  “I told Acee,” I said. “He knew rather generally, but not with any detail until just a few years ago. When he was already my ex-husband.”

  “Was he supportive?”

  I nodded. “Yes, he was. He...he saved my life back then. In those days, single women weren’t allowed to be pregnant. I was going to have a child by my rapist. And I was probably going to lose you because of it.”

  “Oh gosh.” Laney’s expression was stricken. I wasn’t sure if it was sympathy or disgust.

  “When Marley didn’t live...” I began in explanation. “I have so much guilt about that. Maybe if I’d wanted him more he might have survived. Maybe if I thought more about the child and less about what had happened to me. I was just so scared.”

  I sat down on the side of her bed. I stared down at my hands, afraid to see what might be in her eyes.

  “Acee knew that it wasn’t his baby?” she asked.

  I nodded. “I was already pregnant when I married him. I told him that the baby’s father had forced me. But I never revealed...the reality of what that meant.”

  “That you’d been raped,” she said.

  “Yes. Raped.” I let out a deep breath and shook my head. “I’ve been working for the Rape Crisis Center in Dallas. It’s really helped. I have been a lot better since I found out that I’m not alone and what I feel is not...weakness or craziness or...or my own fault.”

  “Oh, Mama.”

  Laney reached over and wrapped her arms around me holding me so tight. I felt the tears welling up in my eyes. Once I started crying, she did, too. The two of us sat there, hugging and bawling. It was a great feeling, letting go and expressing my emotions with my daughter. I wanted to really get into it, but I knew that prob
ably wasn’t good for the baby, either.

  Deliberately I fished the tissue box out of the bedside table. We wiped our eyes and blew our noses and tried to straighten up.

  “I was always sorry about Marley,” she said. “I’m really sorry about all that happened.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ve heard that something like this affects women like posttraumatic stress disorder. Have you had problems like that? Long-term effects?”

  “Oh, none really,” I answered quickly. And then as she continued to look at me, her expression completely devoid of condemnation, I felt compelled to add. “Except for my sex life. Or my lack of it. I haven’t been able to...to have pleasurable sex since it happened.”

  Laney’s eyes widened.

  “So, no matter what you think the reasons were for my break-up with Acee, you can add close to complete disaster on that score.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “And there was the travel thing,” I continued.

  Laney looked at me questioningly. “You mean, how you would never go anywhere?”

  I nodded. “I started becoming afraid of any place unfamiliar. It got worse and worse, until I was practically a prisoner here in the house,” I admitted. “I still get jittery every time I drive into Dallas.”

  “It happened there?”

  “Yes, when we were living in the duplex near Cummings Park.”

  Laney drew a startled indrawn breath. “I remember when we left there,” she said. “I remember you had bruises on your face.”

  “Yes,” I said simply.

  “So, what happened? Did someone break in the house?”

  “I let him in,” I told her. “It was the man who lived next door.”

  “Mr. Grimes?”

  “Oh God, Laney,” I said. “I hoped you wouldn’t remember him.”

  “I don’t much,” she said. “But I remember his wife. I stayed with her after school.”

  “Yes.”

  That afternoon we went for a stroll. Just getting outside made us both feel better. I helped her unpack. She’d brought all of the baby’s stuff and most of her own clothes, but she’d left the rest of her things in the house.