“Good for you, Melanie,” Tamsin said, and I mentally echoed that. “It can be hard to stand up for what you know is right. Firella?”
“Oh. Well… I moved here from New Orleans about a year ago,” Firella said. “I’m an assistant principal at the junior high school here in Shakespeare, and I had a similar job in Louisiana.” I revised my estimate of her age upward. Firella was probably closer to fifty than to the thirty-five I’d originally assumed. “When I lived in New Orleans, I got raped at the school, by a student.” Then Firella’s lips clamped shut on the rest of her story, as if she’d given me enough to think about, and she was right. I remembered the smell of school, chalk and lockers and dirty industrial carpeting, and the silence of the building after the children had gone home. I thought of someone, some predator, moving silently through that building…
“He broke my arm, too,” Firella said. She moved her left arm a little as if testing its usability. “He knocked out some of my teeth. He gave me herpes.”
She said all this quite matter-of-factly.
She shrugged, and was silent.
“And they caught him?”
“Yeah,” the woman said wearily. “They caught him. He told them I’d been having sex with him for months, that it was consensual. It got really ugly. It was in all the papers. But the broken arm and the missing teeth were powerful testimony, yes indeed.”
Tamsin cut a glance toward me to make sure I was absorbing the fact that I wasn’t the only victim in the world who’d gone through an extraordinary ordeal. I’ve never been that egotistical.
“Lily, do you feel able to tell us your story tonight?” the therapist asked.
Fighting a nearly overwhelming impulse to get up and walk out, I forced myself to sit and consider. I thought about Jack’s nose, and I thought about the trust the other women had extended to me. If I had to do this, it might as well be now as any other time.
I focused on the doorknob a few feet past Tamsin’s ear. I wished that some time in the past, I’d made a tape recording of this. “Some years ago, I lived in Memphis,” I said flatly. “On my way home from work one day, my car broke down. I was walking to a gas station when I was abducted at gunpoint by a man. He rented me to a small group of bikers for the weekend. That was what he did for a living. They took me to a-well, it was an old shack out in the fields, somewhere in rural Tennessee.” The fine trembling began, the nearly imperceptible shivering that I could feel all the way to the soles of my feet. “There were about five of them, five men, and one or two women. I was blindfolded, so I never saw them. They chained me to a bed. They raped me, and they cut patterns on my chest and stomach with knives. When they were leaving, one of them gave me a gun. He was mad at the guy who’d rented me to them, I can’t remember why.” That wasn’t true, but I didn’t want to explain further. “So the gun had one bullet. I could have killed myself. I was a real mess by then. It was real hot out there.” My fists were clenched, and I was struggling to keep my breathing even. “But when the man who’d kidnapped me came back-I shot him. And he died.”
It was so quiet in the room that I could hear my own breathing.
I waited for Tamsin to say something. But they were waiting on me. Janet said, “Tell us how it ended.”
“Ah, well, a farmer, it was his land, he came by and found me. So, he called the police, and they took me to the hospital.” The condensed version.
“How long?” Tamsin asked.
“How long did they keep me? Well, let’s see.” The shivering increased in intensity. I knew it must be visible by now. “Friday afternoon and Friday night, and all day Saturday, and part of Sunday? I think.”
“How long before the farmer got there?”
“Oh! Oh, sorry. That was the rest of Sunday, and Monday, and most of Tuesday. Quite a while,” I said. I sat up straighter, made my fists unclench. Tried to force myself to be still.
“I remember that,” Melanie said. “I was just a kid, then. But I remember when it was in all the papers. I remember wishing you had had a chance to shoot them all.”
I flicked a glance at her, surprised.
“I remember thinking that you were asking for it, walking after your car had broken down,” Firella said. We all looked at her. “That was before I found out that women had a right to walk anywhere they wanted, with no one bothering ‘em.”
“That’s right, Firella,” Tamsin said firmly. “What’s the rule, people?”
We all waited.
“Don’t blame the victim for the crime,” she said, almost chanting.
“Don’t blame the victim for the crime,” we chorused raggedly. I thought some of us got the idea better than others, judging by their expressions.
“Baby-sitter accepts a ride home with the father of the kids, he rapes her. Is she at fault?” Tamsin asked us fiercely.
“Don’t blame the victim for the crime!” we said. I have to admit this was an effort for me. I was about to decide Jack owed me big time when I remembered the blood running out of his nose.
“A woman’s walking on a street alone at night, she gets grabbed and raped,” Tamsin said. “Is it her fault?”
“Don’t blame the victim for the crime!” we said firmly.
“A woman’s wearing a tight skirt and no bra, goes to a bar in a bad part of town, gets drunk, takes a ride with a stranger, gets raped. Is it her fault?”
The chorus died out. This required more thought.
“What do you think, Lily?” Tamsin asked me directly.
“I think wanting to look attractive, even provocative, doesn’t mean you deserve to get raped. I think even the stupidity of getting drunk with people you don’t know doesn’t merit the punishment of being raped. At the same time, women should be responsible for their own safety…” I trailed off.
“And what does being responsible for your own safety mean?”
That was something I could answer. “It means learning to fight,” I said with certainty. “It means being cautious. It means taking care of your car so it won’t break down, making sure your doors are locked, and evaluating the scene around you for danger.”
Some of the women looked dubious when I mentioned fighting, but the rest of my measures met with approval.
“How responsible for your own safety were you before you got raped?” the therapist asked. Her dark eyes were fixed on me intently. She leaned forward, and the blouse gaped slightly because she filled it up too much.
I tried to remember. “Not very. I made sure I always had enough money to make a phone call. When I was going on a first date with someone I didn’t know, I made sure a friend or two knew where I was going and who I was with.”
“So wouldn’t you say that most of this wisdom is hindsight?”
“Yes.”
“Can you blame other women for not having the same sense?”
“No.”
The talk went on, and I confined myself to listening for the rest of the hour. The problem of responsibility was a knotty one. Women dress provocatively to attract sexual attention and admiration, because that’s gratifying. I believed that very few women would wear a push-up bra, a low-cut blouse, high heels, tight skirts, if they were going to stay home working on the computer, for example. But sexual attention does not equate with rape. I knew of no woman who would walk out the door for an evening of barhopping with the idea that maybe she would enjoy being forced at knifepoint to give a blow job to a stranger. And very few women walked alone at night hoping a man would offer them a choice between sex and strangulation.
The fact remained that stupidity and/or poor judgment are not punishable by rape. And that was the bottom line, as far as I was concerned, and as far as Tamsin was, I thought, by the way she seemed to be steering the group.
What about the great-grandmothers and children who got raped? They were only sex objects to the eyes of the hopelessly warped. They could hardly be accused of “asking for it.”