Chapter One, Part 3

Lucky: A Memoir
by Alice Sebold

(Page 3 of 3)

I thought, even then, that this doctor needed the Valium he prescribed for me more than I did. He was exhausted. I remember telling him I knew about Valium and so he didn't need to explain.

"It will make you calm," he said.

My mother had been addicted to it when I was little. She had lectured me and my sister on drugs and as I grew older I understood her fear - that I would get drunk or high and lose my virginity to some fumbling boy. But in these lectures what I always pictured was my vibrant mother diminished somehow, lessened - as if a gauze had been thrown over her sharp edges.

I couldn't see Valium as the benign drug the doctor made it out to be. I told him this but he pooh-poohed it. When he left the room I did what I knew I would do almost immediately, and crumpled up the prescription to throw it into the waste bin. It felt good to do it. A sort of "fuck you" to the idea that anyone could sweep this thing I'd suffered under the carpet. Even then I thought I knew what could happen if I let people take care of me. I would disappear from view. I wouldn't be Alice anymore, whatever that was.

A nurse came in and told me she could send in another one of my friends to help me. With the painkillers I would need a nurse or someone else to help me keep my balance in the shower. I wanted Mary Alice, but I didn't want to be mean, so I asked for Tree, Mary Alice's roommate and one of our group of six.

I waited and as I did, I tried to think of what I could tell my mother - some kind of story that would explain why I was so sleepy. I could not know, despite the doctor's warnings, how sore I would be in the morning, or that an elegant latticework of bruises would appear along my thighs and chest, on the undersides of my upper arms and around my neck, where, days later, at home in my bedroom, I would begin to make out the individual pressure points of his fingertips on my throat - a butterfly of the rapist's two thumbs interlocking in the center and his fingers fluttering out and around my neck. "I'm gonna kill you, bitch. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up." Each repetition punctuated by the smash of my skull against brick, each repetition cutting off, tighter and tighter, the airflow to my brain.

Tree's face, and her gasp, should have told me that I couldn't hide the truth. But she recovered herself quickly and helped me navigate over to the shower stall. She was uncomfortable around me; I was no longer like her but was other than.

I think the way I survived in the early hours after the rape was by spiraling the obsession of how not to tell my mother over and over again in my brain. Convinced it would destroy her, I ceased thinking of what had happened to me and worried about her instead. My worry for her became my life raft. I clung to it, coming in and out of consciousness on my way to the hospital, during the internal stitches of the pelvic exam, and while the psychiatrist gave me the prescription for the very pills that had once made my mother numb.

The shower was in the corner of the room. I walked like a wobbly old lady and Tree steadied me. I was concentrating on my balance and so did not see the mirror to my right until I looked up and I was almost right in front of it.

"Alice, don't," Tree said.

But I was fascinated, the way I had been as a child when, in a special room with low light, I saw an exhibit at the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archaeology. It was nicknamed Blue Baby and it was a mummy, with the disintegrated face and body of a child who had died centuries ago. I recognized something alike in it - I was a child as this Blue Baby had been a child.

I saw my face in the mirror. I reached my hand up to touch the marks and cuts. That was me. It was also an undeniable truth: No shower would wipe the traces of the rape away. I had no choice but to tell my mother. She was too savvy to believe any story I could now fashion. She worked for a newspaper, and she took pride in the fact that it was impossible to pull the wool over her eyes.

The shower was small and made of white tile. I asked Tree to turn on the water. "As hot as you can," I said.

I took off the hospital gown and handed it to her.

I had to grip the tap and a handle on the side of the shower to stay upright. This left me unable to scrub myself. I remember telling Tree I wished I had a wire brush but that even that wouldn't be enough.

She drew the curtain and I stood there, letting the water beat over me.

"Can you help me?" I asked.

Tree pulled the curtain back a few inches.

"What do you want me to do?"

"I'm afraid I'll fall down. Can you take the soap and help wash me?"

She reached through the water and got the large square brick of soap. She drew it down my back, nothing but the bar of soap touching me. I felt the rapist's words, "worst bitch," as I would feel them almost constantly for years when I undressed in front of other people.

"Forget it," I said, unable to look at her. "I'll do it myself. Just put the soap back."

She did, then pulled the curtain closed, before leaving.

I sat down in the shower. I took a washcloth and lathered it up. I scrubbed hard with the rough towel, under a tap so hot my skin had already turned beet red. The last thing I did was put the towel over my face and with both hands rubbed it back and forth over and over again until the cuts and their blood turned the small white towel pink.

After the hot shower, I dressed in clothes that Tree and Diane had hurriedly selected from the few clean clothes I had. They had forgotten any underwear so I had no bra or underpants. What I did have was a pair of old jeans that I had embroidered flowers on while still in high school and then, when the knees ripped open, had sewn intricate handmade patches on - long strips of pleated paisley and deep-green velvet. My grandmother had labeled them my "rebel" pants. On top, I wore a thin white-and-red-striped blouse. I left the shirttails out, hoping to hide as much as possible of the jeans.

The heat of the shower and the Demerol worked together to make me groggy during the drive to the police station. I remember seeing the resident advisor, a sophomore named Cindy, outside the security door on the third floor of the police station, called the Public Safety Building. I wasn't prepared to see anyone with such a bright face, such an all-American-coed presence.

Mary Alice stayed outside with Cindy as police officers led me through a security door. I met a plainclothes detective inside. He was short, with longish black hair. He reminded me of Starsky from Starsky and Hutch, and seemed different from the other policemen. He was nice to me but his shift was ending. He assigned me to Sergeant Lorenz, who had not yet arrived at the station.

In hindsight I can only imagine how I appeared to them. My face was swollen, my hair wet, my clothes - the "rebel" pants especially and the lack of a bra - and on top of this, the Demerol.

I made a composite from microfilm features. I worked with an officer and was frustrated because none of my rapist's features seemed to be among the fifty or so noses, eyes, and lips. I gave exact descriptions but when nothing was acceptable to me among the tiny black-and-white features I could select, the policeman decided on what was best. The composite that went out that night looked little like him.

The police then took a series of pictures of me, never knowing another series had been taken earlier that night. Ken Childs, a boy I liked, had shot almost a whole roll of film, snapping candids of me in various poses throughout his apartment.

Ken had a crush on me, and I knew that he was taking the pictures to show to people at home over the summer. I knew the photos would be judged. Was I pretty? Did I look smart? Would his friends be reduced to "She seems nice"? Or, worse still, "That's a nice sweater she's wearing"?

I had gained weight, but the jeans I wore were still too big for me, and I'd borrowed my mother's white oxford-cloth shirt and a tan cable cardigan sweater. The word that comes to mind here is frumpy.

So, in the "before" photos taken by Ken Childs, I am at first posing, then giggling, then laughing openly. For all my self-consciousness, I also got lost in the giggling silliness of our crush. I balance a box of raisins on my head, I stare at the writing on the back as if it were a gripping text, I prop my feet up on the edge of his dining table. I smile, smile, smile.

In the "after" photos the police took, I stand shocked. The word shock, in this context, is meant to mean I was no longer there. If you have seen police photos of crime victims, you will know that they appear either bleached or unusually dark. Mine were of the overexposed variety. There were four types of poses. Face. Face and neck. Neck. Standing with identity number. No one tells you at the time how important these photos will be. The cosmetics of rape are central to proving any case. So far, in appearance, I was two for two: I wore loose, unenticing clothes; I had clearly been beaten. Add this to my virginity, and you will begin to understand much of what matters inside the courtroom.

Finally, I was allowed to leave the Public Safety Building with Cindy, Mary Alice, and Tree. I told the officers in the station that I would return in a few hours and could be counted on to give an affidavit and look through mug shots. I wanted them to see I was serious, I wouldn't let them down. But they were working the night shift. Even when I did come back - and in their minds, it was far from certain that I would - they wouldn't be there to see I'd kept my word.

The police drove us back to Marion Dorm. It was early in the morning. Light had begun to creep up over Thorden Park at the top of the hill. I had to tell my mother.

The dorm was deathly quiet. Cindy went into her room at the top of the hall and Mary Alice and I agreed we would meet her there momentarily. Neither of us had a private phone.

We went to my room, where I found a bra and underwear to put on under my clothes.

Back out in the hallway, we ran into Diane and her boyfriend, Victor. They had been up all night, waiting for me to come home.

My relationship to Victor, before that morning, consisted primarily of not understanding what he had in common with Diane, whom I found loud. He was handsome and athletic and very, very quiet around all of us. He had entered school already having chosen his major. It was something like electrical engineering. Very different from poetry. Victor was black.

"Alice," Diane said.

Other people came out of Cindy's open doorway. Girls I knew vaguely or those I didn't know.

"Victor wants to hug you," Diane said.

I looked at Victor. This was too much. He was not my rapist, I knew that. That was not the issue. But he was blocking my way to the last thing on earth I wanted to do and the thing I knew I had to do. Make that call to my mother.

"I don't think I can," I said to Victor.

"He was black, wasn't he?" Victor asked. He was trying to get me to look at him, look right at him.

"Yes."

"I'm sorry," he said. He was crying. The tears ran slowly down the outside of his cheeks. "I'm so sorry."

I don't know whether I hugged him because I could not stand to see him crying (so odd in the Victor I knew, the quiet Victor who studied diligently or smiled shyly at Diane), or because I was prompted further by those around us. He held me until I had to pull away and then he let me go. He was miserable, and I cannot even now imagine what was going on inside his head. Perhaps he already knew that both relatives and strangers would say things to me like "I bet he was black," and so he wanted to give me something to counter this, some experience in the same twenty-four hours that would make me resist placing people in categories and aiming at them my full-on hate. It was my first hug from a man after the rape - black or white - and all I knew was that I couldn't give anything back. The arms around me, the vague threat of physical power, were all too much.

By the end, Victor and I had an audience. It was something I would have to get used to. Standing close to him, but separated from the embrace, I was aware of Mary Alice and of Diane. They belonged. The others were foggy and off to the side. They were watching my life as if it were a movie. In their version of the story, where did they fit? I would find out over the years that in a few versions, I was their best friend. Knowing a victim is like knowing a celebrity. Particularly when the crime is clouded in taboo. When I was doing research for this book, back in Syracuse, I met a woman like this. Without recognizing me at first, only knowing I was writing a book on Alice Sebold's rape case, she hurried in from another room and told me and those assisting me that "the victim in that case was my best friend." I had no idea who she was. When someone referred to me by name, she blinked and then came forward, embracing me to save face.

In Cindy's room, I sat down on the bed closest to the door. Cindy, Mary Alice, and Tree were there, perhaps Diane. Cindy had shooed the others out and shut her door.

It was time. I sat with the phone in my lap. My mother was only a few miles away, having driven up the day before to take me home from Syracuse. She would be up and puttering around her hotel room at the Holiday Inn. At that time she traveled with her own coffeemaker because she made decaf in her room. She was coming down from as much as ten cups of coffee a day, and restaurants weren't yet in the custom of serving decaf.

Before she had dropped me off at Ken Childs's house the evening before, we had agreed she would come to the dorm around 8:30 a.m. - a late start for her but a concession to the fact that I would have been up late saying good-bye to friends. I looked around at my girlfriends, hoping they would say, "You don't look so bad," or provide me with the single and perfect story to explain the cuts and bruises on my face - the story that I hadn't been able to come up with during the night.

Tree dialed the phone.

When my mother picked up, Tree said, "Mrs. Sebold, this is a friend of Alice's, Tree Roebeck."

Maybe my mother said hello.

"I'm going to put Alice on the phone now. She needs to speak with you."

Tree handed me the phone.

"Mom," I started.

She must not have heard what I thought was the obvious quaver in my voice. She was irritated.

"What is it, Alice? You know I'm due over soon; can't it wait?"

"Mom, I need to tell you something."

She heard it now. "What, what is it?"

I said it as if I were reading a line from a script.

"Last night I was beaten and raped in the park."

My mother said, "Oh, my God," and then, after a quick inhalation of breath, a startled gasp, she reeled herself in. "Are you all right?"

"Can you come get me, Mommy?" I asked.

She said it would be twenty minutes or so, she had to pack up and check out, but she would be there.

I hung up the phone.

Mary Alice suggested that we wait in her room until my mother arrived. Someone had bought bagels or doughnuts.

In the time since our arrival back at the dorm, students had woken up. There was hurry all around me. Many students, including my friends, were meeting parents for breakfast or rushing to bus stations and airports. People would attend to me and then switch off to finish packing. I sat with my back against the cinder-block dorm wall. As people came in and out and the door opened, I could hear bits of conversation.

"Where is she?" "Raped…" "…see her face?" "…she know him?" "…always weird…"

I had not eaten anything since the night before - since the raisins at Ken Childs's house - and I could not look at the bagels or doughnuts without feeling what - the rapist's penis - had last been in my mouth. I tried to stay awake. I had been up for more than twenty-four hours - far longer, what with the all-nighters that I'd pulled during finals week - but I was afraid to fall asleep before my mother got there. My girlfriends and the resident advisor, who, after all, was only nineteen, tried to take care of me, but I had begun to notice that I was now on the other side of something they could not understand. I didn't understand it myself.

Copyright © 1999 by Alice Sebold

About the Author

Alice Sebold is the author of the memoir Lucky. She has been chosen by the Village Voice as a Writer on the Verge and has written for the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. She lives in California with her husband, Glen David Gold.