mean the walk or how you got the clothes or how you found a key to your apartment with your purse gone. I mean when you get home, bed quiet, made. It looked like my bed itself was sleeping. Filmy pink bedspread I’d had since I was a girl, folded like a gown. I was that girl’s heavy ghost. I showered, got under the sheets that looked like a desert, waves of pink and tan.
Waking up is panic. You don’t want it to be, and it is anyway. The day after I was raped, I had to go to work at the juice bar in the health food store. It’s hectic at lunchtime, a long line for sandwiches. I tell the restaurant manager, “I have to leave early, for the doctor’s. I’ve been raped.” The manager says, “Okay.” Squarish body, tall yellow hairdo. She’ll never ask a word about the rape.
I don’t have an appointment—didn’t schedule the rape a monthin advance—but I drive to the military base. At the gate, I show my laminated ID card, and the sailor in his whites waves me in. It’s been more than a year since I was in the alcohol treatment center on this base, but I’m still a military dependent. I still go to the Dry Dock meeting, but haven’t been able to put any time together. The Queen of Going Back Out. When I’m at that meeting, I just want to breathe the steadiness in. My doctor is in Family Practice. Behind the semicircle desk are two nurses and a receptionist. “I’ve been raped,” I say mechanically. The three women freeze. I feel I should have prepared them. It’s like a science fiction show in which I’ve zapped them to keep them in place while I do some thinking.
When things start moving again, I’m in my doctor’s office. I don’t know how I got there. He has a sports bag under his desk. From the TV rape movies, I expect an examination. He doesn’t examine me. His mouth moves. I say something back. But it’s like there’s no sound. He picks up a black receiver to phone the police. Before the rape, I’d been drunk, blacked out. I’d tried to remember the street sign, the house where I’d been taken. But even though I’d stared from the car window as I’d been driven away, where I’d been only got brighter and brighter. Until all I saw was glare. I imagine telling the policeman about glare.
My doctor’s face is red, shiny. His fingers mess up the part in his straight brown hair. It’s easy to do—flyaway baby hair. I stand up, lean over his desk, say “No.”
“What do you mean?” he asks. I didn’t know. Things were out of order. My doctor’s head is like a ball, his whole body has a rolypoly look, even with the gym bag under the desk, the appearance of exercise. “Then what do you want me to do?” he asks. He looks concerned. I hadn’t imagined the specifics of the visit, just a sort of medicinal cleansing, a bacteria killer like the red antiseptic you pour on wounds. A foamy green bath of pHisoderm like they gave me to wash with before touching my baby.
I say, “Nothing. It’s okay. I’m okay.”
This is 1983. Years before, a local bodybuilder, Edward Keaton, finds a drunk girl vomiting and staggering outside JJ Whispers, a club on Lee Road in Winter Park, Florida. This is just down the road from the juice bar where I work. Years before, Keaton and his wife offer the girl a ride home, and she wakes up blindfolded, half-naked, and sick on the couple’s apartment floor. For five hours. Choked into compliance, she escaped in the morning when the Keatons escorted her to her car . The girl ran home, and her mother called the police. The defense lawyer will say that the girl had trumped up charges because she was embarrassed about having had lesbian sex . But the bodybuilder gets sent to prison for life: kidnapping, five counts of sexual battery, two counts of battery, and one count of unlawful interception of oral communication—he’d taped the whole thing. As star witness, saying she’d been ordered to rape the girl, his wife gets five years.
I didn’t know a jury
Waking up is panic. You don’t want it to be, and it is anyway. The day after I was raped, I had to go to work at the juice bar in the health food store. It’s hectic at lunchtime, a long line for sandwiches. I tell the restaurant manager, “I have to leave early, for the doctor’s. I’ve been raped.” The manager says, “Okay.” Squarish body, tall yellow hairdo. She’ll never ask a word about the rape.
I don’t have an appointment—didn’t schedule the rape a monthin advance—but I drive to the military base. At the gate, I show my laminated ID card, and the sailor in his whites waves me in. It’s been more than a year since I was in the alcohol treatment center on this base, but I’m still a military dependent. I still go to the Dry Dock meeting, but haven’t been able to put any time together. The Queen of Going Back Out. When I’m at that meeting, I just want to breathe the steadiness in. My doctor is in Family Practice. Behind the semicircle desk are two nurses and a receptionist. “I’ve been raped,” I say mechanically. The three women freeze. I feel I should have prepared them. It’s like a science fiction show in which I’ve zapped them to keep them in place while I do some thinking.
When things start moving again, I’m in my doctor’s office. I don’t know how I got there. He has a sports bag under his desk. From the TV rape movies, I expect an examination. He doesn’t examine me. His mouth moves. I say something back. But it’s like there’s no sound. He picks up a black receiver to phone the police. Before the rape, I’d been drunk, blacked out. I’d tried to remember the street sign, the house where I’d been taken. But even though I’d stared from the car window as I’d been driven away, where I’d been only got brighter and brighter. Until all I saw was glare. I imagine telling the policeman about glare.
My doctor’s face is red, shiny. His fingers mess up the part in his straight brown hair. It’s easy to do—flyaway baby hair. I stand up, lean over his desk, say “No.”
“What do you mean?” he asks. I didn’t know. Things were out of order. My doctor’s head is like a ball, his whole body has a rolypoly look, even with the gym bag under the desk, the appearance of exercise. “Then what do you want me to do?” he asks. He looks concerned. I hadn’t imagined the specifics of the visit, just a sort of medicinal cleansing, a bacteria killer like the red antiseptic you pour on wounds. A foamy green bath of pHisoderm like they gave me to wash with before touching my baby.
I say, “Nothing. It’s okay. I’m okay.”
This is 1983. Years before, a local bodybuilder, Edward Keaton, finds a drunk girl vomiting and staggering outside JJ Whispers, a club on Lee Road in Winter Park, Florida. This is just down the road from the juice bar where I work. Years before, Keaton and his wife offer the girl a ride home, and she wakes up blindfolded, half-naked, and sick on the couple’s apartment floor. For five hours. Choked into compliance, she escaped in the morning when the Keatons escorted her to her car . The girl ran home, and her mother called the police. The defense lawyer will say that the girl had trumped up charges because she was embarrassed about having had lesbian sex . But the bodybuilder gets sent to prison for life: kidnapping, five counts of sexual battery, two counts of battery, and one count of unlawful interception of oral communication—he’d taped the whole thing. As star witness, saying she’d been ordered to rape the girl, his wife gets five years.
I didn’t know a jury
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