Then—shift. A fist broke in. A fist with a ring on it. A ring set with a large, hard stone. Fist, ring, stone. The man’s head jerked to the side. He stumbled back. He flung a handful of change at me and fled down the steps to the train. The coins clattered to the floor.
The man whose fist it was gave me his card—he’d act as a witness, he said, if I wished to press charges. I raced up the stairs to the token booth. Choking out words through sobs, I told the clerk I’d been assaulted. Behind me, commuters churned through turnstiles. One paused, listened in, slapped me with a scolding: “What were you doing, riding at the wrong end of the train?”
Later, two detectives came to my school to record my complaint. The principal, sitting with me during the interview, vouched for my gentleness. “Helen wouldn’t hurt a fly,” she said.
This, I was beginning to understand, was a problem. Yes, in the thick of each attack, fear and shame had kept me still and silent. But there was something else: I had no story at the ready showing I could fight.
Soon after the third assault, I signed up for karate classes at an all-female dojo a half mile from home. There I learned to kick, punch, block, and kiai—yell—as I did so. A few months later, I wrote a short story in which a teenage girl, exiting a deserted subway station, fends off a band of young male predators with her kick and her kiai and ascends untouched to the sunlight. Thus I prepared myself: the next time a man laid a hand on me, I would fight.
My story did not prepare me to answer, or even recognize, subtler forms of attack. And so, in my bunk in the barn loft, after recording the details of the three assaults, I turned to the last part of Cayta’s assignment: recasting my sexual history in terms of psychic cause and effect.
Having admitted that most of my sexual fantasies involved the man taking the lead—taking “advantage” of me—I sprouted an idea Cayta had seeded: “although none of [the assaults] was pleasurable—the third truly was terrifying and mind-numbing—maybe my lack of response was not absolute, petrifying fear.” In other words: maybe I’d wanted that hated touch.
A couple nights later, I took my journal to the living room to show Cayta. Sitting next to me on the couch nearest the woodstove, she read the three columns of neat black print as the embers crackled and hissed. I wondered if she’d praise me for my honesty. If she’d spot hidden patterns. My chest tingled with the thrill—and risk—of sharing secrets.
Cayta reached the bottom of the last column and turned the page to make sure she’d seen everything. Palm resting on the passage revising my take on why I hadn’t fought, she turned to face me, a shrewd glint in her dark eyes.
“You were raised Catholic, right?”
“Yes,” I said. This was common knowledge. My stock response to Zendiks’ questions about my religious background was, “I’m a recovering Catholic.”
She made a fist and pressed it against the blocks of text. “Don’t you think you drew those assaults to you, since it was the only way you could have a sexual experience without feeling guilty?”
The tingle stilled. Maybe she was right—and this was a precious insight—but it hit me with a condemning thud.
“Well, maybe,” I said.
“So, if you start going after sex on your own terms, you’ll stop vibing into that shit.” Cayta smiled. “That’s pretty cool! And here you can do that.”
I flashed on the Zendik dating scheme, its tantalizing possibilities. Could it really encase me in a shield of consensual touch? If so, then—maybe—this was the place.
My plan, when I’d boarded the bus to North Carolina in late October, had been to give Zendik two weeks. If I didn’t like it, I’d hitchhike fifty miles west, through squat peaks and deep gaps, to the Appalachian Trail. I’d pick it up just east of the Tennessee border and march south toward Georgia.
By the second week in November, the wild persimmon trees at the top of the driveway were shedding their leaves. Each day, fewer fruits hit the ground in sweet vermillion goo-splats. At night, a chill seeped through the seams in the plywood box’s fur of pink fiberglass. Striking out for Georgia was swiftly losing appeal.
Scrunched inside my mummy bag one evening, only my eyes exposed, I caught hold of a question that always seemed to dart away from me in the bustle of the day: Will I stay?
Peering into the future, I glimpsed daunting decisions. My income tax return—which the grant would oblige me to file for the first time—was due in April. Complying, in my view, meant shoving meat down the maw of the US war monster. I’d long admired Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers, who resisted war taxes by living in openhanded poverty, caring for anyone who showed up at a House of Hospitality. Back in late summer, I’d stopped into an IRS office to ask whether I’d still need to pay tax on the grant money if I gave it to charity. The answer was no. Surrendering my $300 apprentice fee to the Zendiks, shortly after learning how dating worked, I’d been glad to pass part of my windfall on to what seemed like a worthy cause.
More pressing than taxes were my $16,500 in student loans—part of the hefty financial aid package that had allowed me to attend a school whose yearly tuition rivaled my family’s annual income. The loans would enter repayment and begin accruing interest on New Year’s Day. I’d owe about $100 per month for the first five years, then about $250 per month for the next ten. I hadn’t been thinking about how I’d pay the money back when I’d signed my first promissory note, on autopilot, at seventeen. During college, I’d dispelled debt-induced anxiety with the failsafe of bankruptcy—still an option until Congress nixed it in 1998. Yes, going bankrupt would have ruined my credit. But the threat seemed abstract, in a family where no one owned a house or a car or used a credit card.
Five months after graduation, I faced not just debt but expectation: that I would get a job with a regular paycheck and send a chunk of that paycheck to the Department of Education’s Direct Loan Processing Center every month till I was thirty-eight. That I would embrace this arrangement out of gratitude for the nice salaries and professional opportunities made possible by my degree from Harvard. I hadn’t known, at seventeen, that I was signing up for selective service in the extractive economy, or that five years later I’d be handed a draft card.
No, thank you, I thought, squeezing my eyes shut. Since entering preschool at the age of three, I’d been hewing to a preset storyline. I was ready—wasn’t I?—to start my own story.
In a journal entry dated “Halloween,” I’d written, “Idea: give all my money to Zendik, so the government can’t get it. Write a letter to the Department of Education saying, this is my contribution to the education of the children of the future.” The Zendik Farm Arts Foundation was registered with the IRS as a 501(c)(3) organization devoted to teaching “farm and life work skills in animal husbandry, horticulture, and trades including carpentry, mechanics, publishing, and music, arts, and crafts.” Recurring two weeks into my immersion in Zendik culture, the idea seemed less a lark than it had at first. Plus, I’d known since I was a kid what a thrill it could be to give money away. In fourth grade, during Lent, I’d stuffed every cent I had into the cardboard “poor box” each student at my Catholic elementary school received from a missionary group called the Propagation of the Faith. I didn’t know what the money would do for the suffering children depicted on the box; I didn’t even know what “Propagation” meant. I just knew I felt cleansed and reckless, exhilarated by a shift I’d chosen to make. In high school, when a wealthy friend of my mother’s slipped me a $100 bill to cover a $17 cab ride home to Brooklyn from the Upper East Side, I handed the hundred to the driver and told him to keep the change. In college, on occasion, I gave $20 bills to spare-changers. My joy was complete in the moment of giving, which felt more like communion than receiving the host at Mass ever had.