Consent

by Donna Freitas

  It would make sense, wouldn’t it? He’d sent me so much mail, and eventually letters that were unmarked, mail I couldn’t anticipate or prevent myself from opening because I didn’t know they were from him. It was my comment about the mail, really, that helped her make the connection, she explained.

  I should see someone who specialized in this, she urged. I wasn’t crazy, I just needed to learn how to reconnect the part of my brain that had buried these experiences and memories to the rest of it. There were people who could help me learn how to talk myself through the dread and the flood of emotion, to tell myself I was safe, that my professor wasn’t right around the corner, lurking, that I was okay. Eventually, she told me, I would stop feeling so out of control, so crazy, and I really would be fine again.

  I did see someone, and it turned out my friend was right, I had PTSD.

  And eventually I would be fine. I was fine and I am.

  I never did tell my parents what happened, though. Not really.

  Each one of them knew something, but neither one of them knew everything.

  I remember a day when my father came to visit me in Vermont. My mother had already died; there was snow on the ground. We were walking back to his car after having lunch.

  “Do you want to know more about what happened in graduate school?” I asked him.

  He was aware of what “more” I meant. He knew I’d hired his friend, the lawyer, for something having to do with a professor.

  “Do you want to tell me?” he asked back.

  “No. I don’t know. No,” I said. “I guess not.”

  This was the truth. I didn’t really want to tell him. But I worried I should tell him.

  Shouldn’t I?

  We got in his car, drove off, and never spoke of it again.

  The only thing I ever told my mother about was the letters. I’d called her up during that spring semester when they were still writing to each other. I’d decided to talk to her over the phone rather than on a visit to Rhode Island so she couldn’t see my face. If I did this in person, she would have been able to read in my eyes that I was lying. Or, at least, that I wasn’t telling her the whole truth. Only a slight sliver of it.

  “Mom,” I began, “I need to talk to you about Father L.”

  “What about him?”

  “I need you to stop. Writing to him, I mean.”

  There was a long pause on the other end.

  “Sweetheart,” she said, “is something wrong?”

  “No, no,” I said. “Everything is fine! But can you do that for me? And can you tell me if he writes you again?”

  “Ohh-kaaay?” She sounded hesitant. Doubtful.

  I changed the subject. She didn’t ask anything more. The conversation moved on, my breathing steadied again. I was through the worst of it, my mother mostly unscathed.

  I don’t know if my parents ever discussed that phone call about the letters, or if they talked about my getting a lawyer. I don’t know if they spent time wondering what was happening to me, if they considered trying to sit down, the three of us, and make me tell them what was going on. Maybe they knew more than I realize. Maybe they guessed some of it. But aside from the occasional “Donna, are you okay?” asked with a certain tone, one that I knew was referring to this thing I was dealing with that we were not discussing out loud, they let the subject go.

  We tiptoed around it from then on, so quietly the topic went completely unexamined. I think my parents could sense I was going through something serious during graduate school, but they never asked for specifics. I don’t think it’s that they didn’t want to know, though maybe in a way they didn’t. But they are very private people, of a different generation, far older than most of my friends’ parents—my mother had me when she was thirty-three, which was considered ancient for someone of her generation to be having a child. But even more significant than my parents’ age was the fact that they’d been raised by my immigrant grandparents during the Great Depression. They were of the mind-set that hardship was part of life, and your duty was to survive it, without much complaint. You didn’t talk about it, you just plowed through everything until you got to the other side. There was no sense dwelling on it, since dwelling wouldn’t get you past it.

  I am certain they wanted to respect my privacy, that they assumed if things got too dire I would turn to them, as when I’d asked my father for the name of a lawyer.

  As hardworking, good people who didn’t talk about their problems, not even to each other, my parents raised me well, had faith in my judgment, and believed that they had a daughter who could hold her own and make good decisions. In a way, I think, it was their faith in me that allowed them to close their mouths and not press me for more. They felt they had a daughter with a good head on her shoulders, a capable person, and that I could handle whatever came at me, even if it was difficult.

  I don’t judge them for not asking. There was so much going on during that time, so much chaos in the house because of my mother’s cancer, my grandmother’s Alzheimer’s, so much sadness and fear, that what I was going through seemed to pale in comparison. I didn’t have cancer, I wasn’t dying. I would get through this, like I’d gotten through everything before it.

  But sometimes now, looking back, I see the gulf this created between me and my family, one that I couldn’t figure out how to bridge, one that I eventually didn’t want to bridge because I was desperate to forget, to move on, to pretend that what happened never happened. I got used to standing there on the other side, alone, while we all agreed not to notice the chasm that was spreading out between us.

  Part Four

  25

  The aftermath of sexual harassment is quiet.

  You learn quickly not to speak about it, not to say anything, because it makes other people uncomfortable. No one knows what to say to you, how to fix things, what might help. It makes people uneasy to know that this thing happened to you, this strange, ugly thing they don’t know how to remedy. So, to not make anyone else feel awkward, you don’t tell people, you don’t tell anyone at all.

  Soon, you are alone in it, you are alone with it, for years.

  So, the aftermath of what I went through is also lonely.

  Even now, decades later, I still don’t have a handle on how to tell the story of my harasser, my stalker, as I have learned to refer to him, to call him and call it (my story), as though he’s something I acquired or earned, like my PhD or my job. I like to forget that he exists, that he is a part of my history that I can’t shake off no matter what I do. On the rare occasion when I do tell someone, a friend, a confidant, I realize I still haven’t figured out how to tell it, that I haven’t mastered this story yet. The means to tell it with grace and confidence still eludes me, despite the fact that it happened so many years ago and despite the fact that I am a storyteller by profession. It has become my professional responsibility and duty to tell stories and tell them well.

  When I do try to give voice to this part of my past, I realize I am not only terrible at telling it, but I get lost in the telling. It’s like a labyrinth that pulls me in and confuses my brain. There is so much of it, so much story, and so many things that he did because he was so creative at stalking me, that I have yet to master the part of being the stalkee. There are so many twists and turns and gotchas in the story that they are a maze I can’t find my way through, a maze that takes me in and messes me up all over again, never letting me out. There are so many details—and it never suffices to share just one, like the biggest among them: I was sexually harassed once, stalked, really, by my mentor, for a couple of years. If only I could stop with this central detail, the fact of the stalking, the harassment, but I cannot. One detail begets another and another, and as soon as one detail is out, the rest want to follow. I don’t know how to end the story, because it is seemingly endless. I don’t know how to get out of the labyrinth of details once the first one has fallen from my lips. I can’t stop them, just like I could not stop him.

  The sh
eer piling up of details has a purpose: my need to prove to the listener that I wasn’t imagining things, that I didn’t, couldn’t have misinterpreted my professor’s behavior, that I didn’t make any of this up, that anyone would have eventually realized that something was wrong with behavior like his. Right? One terrible detail isn’t enough to prove I was a victim. I need hundreds or no one will believe me, will think I made a big deal out of nothing. My self-doubt still, after so many years, pulls me under and overwhelms me. My self-doubt and my shame are still that profound, my worry, my fear that what happened was because of something I did. I am my own best and loudest victim-blamer. I am the first person to blame myself and I invite anyone I tell to blame me, too.

  But is there such a thing as trauma without shame? Isn’t shame an integral part of what causes an event or series of events to become a trauma?

  Back then, during graduate school, I believed I must be the only person to whom something like this could happen. I don’t mean that I thought myself special or unique in a positive way, like I had been lifted up and singled out for this attention. I mean it in that terrible, shameful way, where I felt that somehow I was being punished, that there was something about me that had attracted this unwanted attention, that I had lured him. I was unique only in that I’d done something particular, expressly to attract him. I’d given him a signal by accident that brought this experience to my doorstep. I was, am, unique only in that the stalking was somehow, at its foundation, my fault.

  And yet, I am not some shrinking violet either.

  I am fierce, I am outspoken, I am intelligent, I fight back, I am a flirt, I am sexually confident, I go after things, I am strong, I am my mother’s daughter.

  I am all of these things, even though I am also someone who suffered this other thing, and everything that went with it. I don’t quite know how to reconcile all that I am in relation to this one ugly part. But both things are true. I am a force to reckon with, ask any of my friends, and I was broken by this, and my friends could tell you that, too.

  My friend the psychologist talks about but versus and with respect to the specific language women use to describe their struggles with motherhood. Women will say things like “I love my baby, but my baby drives me crazy” and “I love being a mother, but I am also terribly depressed because I am a mother.” She talks to clients about replacing the word but with and, about how two seemingly opposing things can be held in tension, that they need to be held in tension. A woman can love her baby and be driven crazy by that baby. A woman can love being a mother and be terribly depressed about being a mother.

  In that same vein, I am fierce, and I am polite. I am strong, and I am vulnerable. I want things, and sometimes I don’t want things. I am a good judge of people, and sometimes I am too trusting. I am an ardent, insightful, committed feminist, and I let the patriarchy walk all over me.

  And I still blame myself when I look for the reason for what happened to me. I still search for that reason by looking within myself.

  What is wrong with me, what failure was there in my upbringing, what shortcoming in my character, what crack in my self-understanding, my sanity, what thing or things did I do to cause this man to prey on me, specifically? What about me turned him in my direction? What about me made me tolerate something so palpably repulsive for so long? What amount of stupidity in a person is necessary for them to not see that they themselves are the offense, in the eyes of officials? How dumb does a girl have to be to fail to see the truth before her own eyes?

  I know, intellectually, rationally, that I should be shifting the blame somewhere other than me. I know, with everything I am, that if someone stood in front of me and tried to blame my mother for what happened, blame the way she raised me, the way she taught me right and wrong, I would scream at them in a rage for blaspheming against her. But I know, too, that if this same person insinuated, even suggested outright, that I was to blame, at least partly or even completely, I would likely be willing to concede their points, to accept their arguments. To nod my head and agree that yes, yes, everything that happened, all that I’ve recounted here, is completely and totally my fault. That’s probably right, yes.

  Because I am both a survivor and still a victim, and somehow I will always and forever be both.

  26

  I never heard from him again.

  Not directly.

  I hear from him all the time from the place he came to occupy inside my body, inside my brain. My brain chemistry changed to accommodate his actions and my reactions to them. The change seems permanent. I’ve worked hard to switch my brain back to the way it once was, undivided, but so far my success has been limited.

  His behavior stopped a full year and three months after I made that December phone call, pleading with him to go away. The letters, the lurking, the contact with my mother, the peering, the popping up and out in hallways and stairwells, the constant phone calls, all of it finally came to a halt. I’d grown to believe I’d never be free, and then I was.

  I celebrated with Dan. We went to dinner because I wanted to mark the precise moment when I got to move on and forget all of this ugly business. It was a fancy dinner. I remember I ordered duck—it was expensive, and it was the first time I’d ever eaten it. I believed I would now live as though none of it ever happened. I drew a clear line around it, around myself, and then I stepped over it, out of the circle, believing it contained, imprisoned, never to emerge again. I put up fences and walls and barbed wire, hired a guard to defend the rest should it try to escape. I acted and lived as though this part of my life never existed, immersed myself in my studies and went to conferences. It was blissful, truly blissful, for a while.

  I had help.

  Dr. H. worked on my behalf while he was still alive, forcing Father L. away from me during the last year of my studies, after he returned from his sabbatical. Father L. was forbidden to attend my graduation. My family would be there, and Dr. H. ensured I would be able to enjoy the ceremony in peace, assured I wouldn’t even catch a glimpse of him, because he was banished from campus that day.

  But still, he existed, unfortunately, and there were moments when I did catch sight of him, when I glimpsed him scurrying down a hallway or walking out of the building. There was also the problem of conferences—conferences I would attend because it was important for me to attend them, to present papers to establish myself in my field, which was his field. Dan acted as a one-man advance team, checking out rooms before I entered them, doing a sweep of a reception or panel, making sure I could safely walk inside the door.

  It’s not as though I asked Dan to do this, and we didn’t plan that he’d do this—it’s just what he did, instinctively, because he is a good person, a true friend. Most of the time, we didn’t acknowledge this man’s existence or his presence at the conference. Dan did his work silently and invisibly. And when it was discussed, it was done so only cryptically.

  “Let’s not go to that reception now,” he’d say. “Let’s wait thirty minutes and then go.”

  Or, “Why don’t you come with me to this other talk instead?”

  Or, “Maybe we should leave the book fair and get lunch?” he’d ask. “I’m hungry.”

  “Oh, sure,” I would answer. “Okay, great.”

  And that was that.

  The moments when I did catch sight of him, or ran into him at a conference because Dan wasn’t there to steer me away from the confrontation, were the same moments I realized I had not moved on. My whole body would flush, my skin hot and crawling, my vision blurred, heart pounding, the blood rushing in my ears, head dizzy. The reaction was physical, and it was total.

  The worst was in Miami.

  It was June, the conference was small, maybe a few hundred people, with keynote lectures peppered throughout the schedule. For those, everyone would gather in the same hall to listen. Some colleagues and I headed off to lunch after the morning session ended. There was a group of maybe ten of us. We stepped out into the heat and the sun, startlin
g after the cold, stale air of the conference hotel. I was in a good mood, it was hot and the warmth felt wonderful. I was walking along, chatting, letting the swirling sea of conference-goers set the pace, people out in search of a place to eat in the welcoming weather. Our group came to a stop at a red light, and we waited for the signal to cross. I was engrossed in a conversation and wasn’t paying attention to the other people around us.

  Then I glanced at the walk sign to see if it had turned, and I saw him.

  He was standing right in front of me, close enough to touch, not even a foot away, the closest I’d been to him since the very last time I saw him, at my graduate school. He was facing front, but he knew I was there, knew I was right behind him. He was watching me, head angled just enough so he could see me.

  The world tilted, I saw stars, I began to hyperventilate.

  The light went from red to green, people began to cross, he didn’t move.

  At first, neither did I.

  Then, without thinking, I walked away from the crowd, away from my group, away from him, onto the grass of a small park next to the sidewalk. I didn’t even know what I was doing, didn’t think of how I’d appear to the colleagues I was with, I just knew I wanted to get away, away, away, and immediately. No one else there had any idea about him and me, our history. To those colleagues, this man was an esteemed scholar, someone they admired, someone to revere, someone with whom they might try to strike up a conversation. Even invite him to come to lunch with us.

  I sat down in the grass.

  Strange looks were sent my way. There was some uncertainty about what to do among my colleagues, about why in the world I was sitting on the lawn in my conference attire, in my high-heeled sandals and my long, flowing summer dress, probably getting grass stains; about why I was flushed and panting. The friend I’d been talking to, a woman colleague from Minnesota, told everyone to go on without us, and she came over.