"I don't remember the particulars, but eventually it became apparent that something was hanging over her head..." First the disclaimer: No, it hasn't happened to me. That's one of the things I feel compelled to say upfront. It hasn't happened to me, so I can't speak authoritatively. And certainly it can't have affected my life, right?
Here's "my" story.
I have a friend I,ll call "Laura." I went to high school with Laura, where we were a bit closer than acquaintances. I always admired and envied her: she had beautiful dark hair, she was at ease with yourself, and she was (is) very kind. Boys started paying attention to her long before she was interested in them. She had a close relationship with God. As seniors, she started dating a very popular boy from a neighboring school. My group of dateless girlfriends talked admiringly of Laura's situation and how we knew that her relationship with "Brad" was chaste.
A couple of years into college, I ran into her at a movie theater. We exchanged phone numbers and started getting together. She was still dating Brad, though they'd broken up over the summer before getting back together. She was going to school at the U and tending parking lots there to earn money. I'd stop by her lots to chat, and we got to be close friends.
I don't remember the particulars--I know I've purposely buried them--but eventually it became apparent that something was hanging over her head that she needed to get rid of. Finally one afternoon she told me that she had been raped. She was working an isolated lot--the kind her mother had warned her about--and several guys picked her up, took her away, and raped her. I don't know all the details, because there were some parts of her story she couldn't tell at the time. She recognized the men, but didn't prosecute them. She said she "felt sorry" for one who was apparently only peripherally involved. She said she "was glad" it had happened because she learned a lot, or because God had wanted her to learn something. I couldn't understand her way of thinking about what had become my greatest fear.
Her story got worse. She had become pregnant from the rape and had an abortion. Then (her story came out over a course of several days) she told me about the OTHER time she had been raped, by someone she knew. "And it happened again," she said. She became pregnant and had another abortion. "Do you still like me?" she asked me. She also asked me never to tell anyone. And until now, I never have.
Her story affected me so deeply I could barely go to school. My grades slipped. I cried a lot. I went through the worst depression of my life, although it wasn't really recognized as such then. I spent too many hours trying to put her story together in a way that made sense. I kept failing. I suspected Brad of the date rape--still do--but she insisted it wasn't him. Then it turned out that she was sleeping with him, though she didn't really want to, but she couldn't say no. I hated him, told her that was rape too, and simply couldn't understand why she was doing what she was doing. It got to the point where she thought to herself, 'This can't all have come from my experience. It must have happened to my friend, too.'"
So, what's the point of this? One, I guess, is to say that rape, the threat of rape, and the knowledge of rape, affects many women who as yet have not "won the lottery." I'm amazed I ever had the courage to live alone. I, too, remember nights when I wouldn't park in my garage because the walk to the door was simply too dark. I remember a night when I called 911 certain someone was breaking into our apartment complex: it turned out to be the wind.
The other thing about Laura's situation that terrified me was that, for a while, I knew things that were going on with her that I shouldn't have known. One night I got a terrible worried feeling. I called, but she wasn't home. I got more and more panicky, crying and praying, and then the doorbell rang. She was at my front door, shaken, having seen the men who attacked her at a mall. Another time she was supposed to be out with a friend, and I had the same panicky feeling. I cried and prayed until about 10:30, when I suddenly knew she was safe. When I talked to her the next day, I said, "I worried about you last night." She said (in her typical unassuming way), "Oh, it was nothing, it wasn't THEM." And I said, "I know, it was Brad." And she said, "How did you KNOW?" How did I know? It still frightens me, the fact that I knew he was forcing himself on her.
At one point I promised God I wouldn't ask for a boyfriend ever again if he would just let her live. (I just remembered that: Gee, I wonder why I thought I would never get married?)
Finally she couldn't take talking about it with me anymore and we buried the topic, with many of my questions unresolved. It took years until I didn't think about it often, didn't obsess over the inconsistencies in her stories that haunted me. I even wondered if she had lied for some unknown reason. We learn from stories, and I struggled mightily against a story that wouldn't resolve inself in my mind. I never wrote about it either. It never became the neatly-put-together piece of literature that so many "stories" in my life became.
Laura eventually broke up with Brad and married a nice guy. She feared that God would punish her for the abortions but she has four children and is a wonderful mother. We very occasionally tiptoe around the subject of her rape and my reaction, but we each have our own happy lives and fear to disturb them. Or, I suspect, we fear to put ourselves back in such an unsettled and frightening time.
As Eleanor Roosevelt, I believe, said, "You must do the thing you fear." I think I will learn something--at the least, how to be a better friend in such a situation. I've always regretted that my needs got in the way of her needs, even though I suspect that's perfectly natural. I could see myself being one of those people you described in your book: how you would tell your story and watch it hit them and cause them pain. And I don't want to be one of those people, again.
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