Excerpts from TELLING
From Chapter One -- Prologue
One summer evening on the terrace of a Minneapolis restaurant, two women and I unexpectedly found ourselves telling rape stories. Ours. We barely knew one another. The other women were photographers, one on a professional visit from out of town. The conversation turned to my work on this book, and suddenly each had a story to tell: of being raped by a near-stranger in a car, of a date during which clothing was literally torn from her body.
While statistics tell us of rape's constancy -- one in four women, one every six minutes -- if we've won the statistical lottery, our days begin in the morning and proceed until darkness as if rape did not occur. Or so the story goes. Yet women confess to interior conversations about rape that have an almost tyrannical persistence. Fear, curiosity, anger, fantasy, shame, and obsession with rape form a subtext of presence which belies the relative absence of everyday conversation about rape.
If the occurrence of rape were audible, its decibel level equal to its frequency, it would overpower our days and nights, interrupt our meals, our bedtime stories, howl behind our love-making, an insistent jackhammer of distress. We would demand an end to it. And if we failed to locate its source, we would condemn the whole structure. We would refuse to live under such conditions.
In setting down the details of my own experience with rape, I am hoping to start a few conversations. I have done my best to tell the truth, and to acknowledge the layers and distortions which time can contribute to memory. I have not included everything that occurred since August 14, 1981. I've found that the story I have always told myself about these events has a dramatic coherence, that my selective memory has not selected randomly, but has kept the telling details, those images which carry the feelings of a whole time. . .
From Chapter 3 -- Telling Details 1
Before he leaves my apartment, the man warns that he will be watching. If I tell the cops, he will come back and cut off my nose. I accept, at this point, the possibility of omniscience. When I call the crisis line, a sleepy, kind voice tells me what to do: Call the police. Call a friend to drive you to the hospital -- now. I do not call the police. Instead I call a woman whom I do not know well. It's an instinctive choice; she lives close and I sense she can handle such a call at 5:45 in the morning.
At the hospital, a nurse who specializes in treating rape survivors asks me if I have called the police. When I shake my head, she looks at me as if she's about to tell me the most important thing I've ever heard, and she needs to make sure I'm paying attention. I just want you to know, she says gravely, that you're the fourth woman we've had in here this morning.
Until this moment, I have been living in the narrow, deep space of personal drama. All at once, I understand that what has happened to me, so riveting in its details, so vital and absorbing, is common. The world is full of women who've been through it. Do the math. Not whether but which: Which women on the bus, behind the counter selling perfume, singing in the choir, or in your circle of friends have spent mornings like this? I decide to tell.
I am learning not to say I was raped, but a man raped me. Grammatically, this is the difference between the passive and active voice. As I often tell my writing students, the active voice is preferred unless you are trying to hide responsibility.
Out of such semantic sensitivity, the word victim has come in for hard times. It is now shameful in some quarters to describe one's life in terms of what is outside one's control. The word has even been used to designate an alleged brand of feminism. Victim feminism is bad, power feminism is good. I find it impossible to contemplate a feminism which does not consist of claiming power. A participant in "victim feminism" is, as I understand it, a whiner, dwelling on what is wrong, on what has happened to women, as opposed to what women can do about it. Of course, this characterization can also be read as a disguised request for silence.
From Chapter Five - Telling Details 3
I did not want to tell my husband, either. As strange as this sounds to me now, I had to be persuaded to call him at the photography workshop in Vermont. I argued against it, as I recall, on the basis that he would know sooner or later, but if I called him right away he would have to leave the workshop he had looked forward to for so long. Why not wait a few days? I'm not sure out of what exact tangle of hopes and fears this conviction arose, but I do know that it carried no weight with Laurie and Deborah.
It took him less than twenty-four hours to return, and I was desperate for him by the time he arrived. That first afternoon in Laurie's kitchen, I couldn't see the extent of my injury. I was a fire walker, invincible because I had no feelings at all. The cuts began to throb when the shock wore off, and so did my need for the person with whom I felt most loved.
We'd been married seven years. We met when I was a junior at the University of Michigan. He drove up on a motorcycle one day to visit his friend who lived in the front of the house in which I lived at the back. I was on the porch with my roommate, and I remember stopping in mid-sentence to stare at the man on the motorcycle. As he took off his dark glasses and helmet and gazed back at us, curious merely about the sight of strangers on the porch, I felt my soul stake a claim.
We married two years later and lived a lucky, loving life together before the stranger raped me in 1981. We are divorced now after twenty years of marriage, and there is no doubt in either of our minds that the demands of that violent disruption got the best of us. Much of the story of what came after is the story of a marriage, of the bounty of human love and its limits.
From Chapter Seven -- Exodus
During a conversation with the administrator of the writing program in which I taught, I reluctantly told him that I had been raped. I was, essentially, justifying my inability to meet a deadline. I felt particularly awkward because I did not know Jim well, and he was my boss. In addition, I'd already noticed the difficulty which men had in responding to this information. The silent croquet game occurred partly because the men involved were speechless.
But instead, this conversation was a door which opened into an enduring friendship. When I hung up the phone, a curious sensation of relief, almost joy, replaced the apprehension which I had felt. Jim's ability to hear me, to ask questions, and to respond had deep roots. Perhaps that is why he was able to offer me, from that day forward, exactly what I needed: a male friend willing to listen and not wish me silent; respect for what I had brought to the situation rather than a judgment about its occurrence; a loving tolerance for how I'd been harmed and an ability to appreciate the new facets in me that resulted. Therapists refer to the need for "integration," a vision of oneself which includes the traumatic event and its effects. Jim's steadfastness through the many years it took me to integrate rape helped make that possible.
It's my impression that faced with the subject of rape, men tend to scramble for a foothold. In conversations about this book, for example, I'll notice a hesitation, like an intake of breath. I've wondered if this indicates a fear that the conversation will be difficult, that it might be sexist. Do I blame all men? Will I be angry with or afraid of him? These are understandable questions, not unlike those I have when a person of color introduces race into the conversation.
Thoughtful men seem to feel a generalized sense of responsibility, but the discomfort this causes effectively deters further thoughts. A common strategy is to assign rape to a group of matters called "women's issues" which don't require male attention. At a party when the conversation turned to a series of highly publicized rapes, I noticed that all the men had left the room. It may be that men simply feel they have no role in the conversation, nothing to contribute. But clearly rape is not a woman's issue. I asked a few men to help me understand what's in the way...
From Chapter Nine -- Fear
It begins right after we go to bed, or intrudes upon the midnight hours, always the early mornings. I get up and run a bath, hoping the change of activity will distract me from my unswerving belief in disaster. But as I soak beneath the comforting yellow light, I worry that when I splash the water, Tim will rustle the sheets as he turns over in bed, and we will miss the critical moment, the moment danger has chosen to slip a key in the door. I learn to sit perfectly still, to ignore the sound of my heart pounding, my blood blurting along through my body, the thrum of the furnace, the rasp of the refrigerator. I hear beyond these masking noises. I note every sound, examine it, wait to see if it amplifies into disaster, breathe, wait for the next one.
We sleep in a room fully lit. My nights are broken, yellow light staring in our eyes. I wear a nightgown. I wear my glasses. I keep a can of tear gas by my side. I wake Tim at all hours. In the morning, we get up and go to work. And when people ask, I say that I am fine.
I pass the time in the state known as "hyper-vigilance," listening, scanning, adrenaline pumping up my breath, poised literally on my toes for an invisible and therefore tricky, tricky opponent. I emerge as exhausted by the effort as if I'd truly had a brush with danger. This is one of the aspects of post-traumatic fear that is hardest to convey. Imagine how tired you'd be if you defended your house from intruders every night for a month or survived a car crash each night for a year.
From Chapter Twelve -- Do I Look Angry?
"Eighty percent of marriages don't survive a rape," Dorothy warned us. Interesting, I thought at the time, but irrelevant. We had the marriage we wanted. We were together. Period. Cautiously, as if not to tempt fate, we note our amazement that our sexual relationship has not been disrupted. Then, I begin to cry when we make love. At first the tears feel like simple release, the result of strong feelings, but as they become a consistent presence, they open into a great sadness, causing me to turn away from Tim. We take this, too, in stride. For a while.
When I first learned about what was being called feminism in the mid-1960s, I found that the word rolled easily off my tongue. Why would I argue with a political movement dedicated to giving me choice and opportunity and money and power? It wasn't hard to see the need for it, but I have never been especially politically or socially active. After anger focused my attention on the darker particulars of sexism, I embraced feminism in a new way. It became my business, not to argue philosophically or agree with fanatically, but to attend to. In this way, radicalized anger is ultimately productive. And the women who have used an experience with violence -- sexual, economic, or relational -- to transform their perspective, have changed the world.
I'd arrived again at paradox. I'd seen something I couldn't ignore, but I wanted to live in the world with men -- with their intensity, courage, humor, and ambition. I didn't want to be separated by what I saw through that narrow lens.
My anger had already contributed to a growing distance in my marriage. When I withdrew sexually, Tim was faced with a strain of guilt by association. Was he somehow accountable for the sins of his gender? How could we engage while I was so withdrawn unless he initiated the seduction? Was that pressure? What is the relationship between erotic aggression and rape? Had the line moved? Would he overstep? He became trapped in one of those undecodable logical fallacies: A man harmed the woman I love. I am a man. Therefore, I ....
I could give Tim no help. My anger was easily triggered in those days, and my instinct was to withdraw, to resist his affection, in fact to fear it.
From Chapter Fourteen -- Love, Labor, Loss
Andre's birth was dramatic, in contrast to his days of becoming. I spent my pregnancy in a state of quiet astonishment that, at thirty-five, my body could surprise me so. I was still standing apart from my physical being, but this time as an admirer, curious, impressed. I have never been athletic, but I experienced pregnancy with the kind of prideful glory that others find in running or weightlifting.
At the same time, I felt I could take no credit. I was not making the fingernails. I took my cues from the same inner voice full of instructions which I'd heard the night I battled with the rapist. Eat now, eat meat, more mashed potatoes. Both events remain fundamentally mysterious and fundamentally spiritual.
The untold detail of many birth stories is how close women feel to death. In our happiness about the results, we often skip over the process. We gaze into the future and count its toes. But labor brings women into the passageway between being and non-being. Though our eyes are on life, the path clearly goes in two directions. These days, in some parts of the world, the actual risk of death has become quite small. But the door is open. Babies die and women die, and even in a hospital progressive enough to take a step "back" toward allowing autonomy, death slips in the door, an unmistakable presence hovering in the corners of the room.
I needed to tell the story of labor in much the same way as the story of rape. I knew a number of women who were delivering children, and when we exchanged stories, I was surprised by how many had not spoken of their labors before, and by the rush of emotion released in them when they did. I am careful now to marvel not only at the new baby in a mother's arms, but also to marvel at her. I ask pointed questions, inviting the details.
But there was one part of my story that I didn't include in my recitation of the thirty-six hours, the failure to progress, the roller coaster petocin ride. I held the key to a mystery for years before I could fit it to its lock. The mystery I had stumbled on was this. Early in labor I began to have flashbacks to the experience of rape. I remember less of a movie-like quality than the term flashback suggests. I remember visceral panic -- cellular, I might say -- an eerie sensation of being two places at once. It made no sense, and I was unwilling to give it any room, discounting its occurrence until years later.
From Chapter Nineteen -- Justice
In August, 1991, just days before I began to write this book, a man broke into a woman's apartment in the same neighborhood where a man had broken into my apartment a decade before. He grabbed her by the hair, struck and choked her, raped her. Though her screams alerted a neighbor to call 911 and though the police arrived seconds after the man left the building, they made no arrest. A year later, when a suspect in a series of rapes was finally arrested, she joined thirteen others in bringing charges against twenty-one-year-old Timothy Baugh and his nineteen-year-old alleged accomplice, Shawn Enoch.
I attended portions of Baugh's trial in November and December of 1994, drawn to it by the striking similarities between reports of his crimes and my own experience. I nearly didn't go. Thirteen years had passed for me, but time, as I'd learned, is circular. I was afraid. I made-up excuses. How would I find the courtroom? How would I carve time out of my working and parenting schedule to attend? How would I sit in the same room with an accused rapist?
In the front row, Baugh's grandmother rests her head in her hands. She is here every day. Whenever I can, I sit at an angle from which I can watch her. The high cheekbones set in a round face testify to her relation to Baugh. Her steely hair is cropped close to her head like a man's, and she moves with a determined weariness.
For most of the trial, I believe this woman to be Baugh's mother, until a press report identifies her as the grandmother who raised him. "She knows she raised him good, and she knows he's not the serial rapist," reports Baugh's cousin at the end of the trial. "There are many women in our family, and I feel if he had this thing for rape, he would have attacked one of his family members," she explains. When I read this I feel discouraged. The myth that rape is caused by some irrepressible sexuality persists, protecting us from the stark violence at rape's core.
A child of four or five squirms in the seat next to Baugh's grandmother. Eventually he falls asleep in the big chair. His face has a smooth sweetness that I recognize when Timothy Baugh enters the room.
From Chapter Twenty-two -- The Laurel Tree
It was in a garden that I told my son I had survived a rape before he was born. These were words I never wanted to say, though I knew the day would come. I would not have chosen this time or the occasion, but in the end, I felt peaceful with this knowledge between us.
We were together on an island in Lake Michigan, one of those wild and protected places where I have written so much of this book. We were at the end of a long, happy day in the company of loved ones. I had work to do, a deadline to meet. Andre had been outside playing catch, and he drifted inside to hang his arms around my neck. Idly, I acknowledged him, but kept typing, forgetting, as I still sometimes do, that he reads everything now.
In a still, shocked voice he asked, "Is that what your book is about?"
