1.
When she was six years old, Virginia Woolf’s older half-brother would set her up on a windowsill and poke around while she stayed still, paralyzed with fear and disgust, but my older boy cousin just threatened to tell on me if I didn’t kiss him or hug him, and once he threatened worse until another cousin and I, both of us seven years old, went ahead and pulled our pants down while he leered and laughed at his power over us. Afterwards I went to my mother, playing cards in the kitchen with all the adults, and sidled up, hugging her and putting my head on her shoulder until she looked hard at my face, and after that I was never alone with the older boy cousin again.
2.
Just as I was never alone with my uncle, the one who laughed loud and smacked his lips when he talked, the one my mother didn’t like and I didn’t know why until years after he died, when she talked about his poor daughter, how hard it had been when she was growing up, with her mother working nights and my mother and grandmother, suspicious but without proof, trying to intervene but you didn’t talk about such things then, you just prayed and shook your head and had the girl sleep at your house as often as possible, because no girl should be left alone with a man like that. Was that how it was, too, in Virginia Woolf’s family, after her mother died and a second half-brother stole into her room at night and commanded her not to turn on the light?
3.
Another of my cousins attended the college down the street from our house and worked the night shift at a diner where a regular customer came in every morning for coffee. Early one morning my cousin finished her shift and headed to the bus stop, the sun not yet up and frost on the grass, and the regular customer followed her and grabbed her from behind and she fought (she was tall and strong but not strong enough), and afterwards she told my mother, who told me although I was too young to understand, that she would go through with the trial, as ugly as it would get, so there’d be one less sonofabitch on the streets as I grew up. It worked. The man went to jail. But after college my cousin moved so far away that I never saw her again.
4.
Once as a teenager I ended up on a beach in the middle of the night with a guy a couple years older than me who dug sand from beneath an overturned lifeguard boat so we could crawl in and be warm and hidden, and only then did I realize how impossible it would be to get out again if he didn’t want me to, his muscles having been one of the things that attracted me to him, the defined forearms and biceps, the tall, slim strength of him. But when I told him I didn’t want to have sex, that I never had before, he stroked my face and hugged me because not every man feels entitled and sometimes it’s only the luck of the draw which kind of man you get.
In those years it happened again and again that I found myself somewhere I hadn’t intended to be, at a house rented by four guys, or in a car outside a club, drunk or stoned and not always knowing what I wanted until it started and then sometimes not wanting anything at all because his kiss was too sloppy or his hands too fumbling, so I’d say uh-uh, no, not tonight, sorry, and he—all those different he’s—backed off.
5.
Of course there was the one time I wanted to say no but didn’t, with a guy whose kiss I liked and whose hands moved at just the right pace, a guy to whom I thought about saying “not tonight” because what I wanted was tomorrow instead, a long walk, a meal, something like a date, but I didn’t say any of this because there was a determination to this guy, something in him telling something in me that things could go the way they were going or else, and there was no point, I told myself, in becoming a victim on principle.
6.
In college a guy picked me up for a first date without coming to the door, just sat in the driveway blowing the horn, so I made sure to pay for my own dinner, which surprised and pleased him, and then we went to a concert at a club where I paid for my own drinks, three strong ones because I’ve always liked to drink, and this also surprised and pleased him. Afterward we got into his car and he said his buddy had an apartment nearby where we could hang out, and I said I’d rather go home and he asked why, why didn’t I want to hang out, hadn’t we had a nice time, hadn’t he taken me to a great concert, his voice rising with each question, and although we were in an area of town that I didn’t consider safe, I planned the route I would take after jumping out of the moving car, keys threaded through my fist, and reminded myself of all the ways I knew to fight dirty. But in the end he took me home and said good-bye in a disgusted voice, and what did I say in return? I said thank you.
7.
One night after the restaurant closed, my boss drove me to my car because his wife asked him to. It was dark and raining and she didn’t want me walking alone into the parking garage where anyone might lurk, and when I thanked my boss he tried to kiss me, fat tongue lapping like a dog’s at the side of my mouth, though he was the age of my father and I had never flirted with him or even cracked a joke that I could remember. The next week, just after closing, after the front door was locked from the inside and the key tucked into his pocket, he called for me to come down to the storeroom which was accessible through a trap door beneath one of the tables or else through a series of halls in the belly of the building that I’d never traversed, and so I leaned over the hole in the floor and said no, and he called up again, “Come down or you’re fired!” and I called back, “No way!” while his wife’s brother mopped the floor and snickered. By the time the boss came back upstairs, I’d opened a side window and set a pair of scissors under the counter, blades open for easy access, but he unlocked the door without prompting, eyeing me suspiciously, and two days later I quit.
8.
Then there was the time a friend phoned me from the city where she went to college, which was hours from the city where I went to college, because she wanted me to hear it from her and to know she was OK and grateful to be alive and also furious with herself for opening the car window after he tapped on it, but she saw the gun and assumed he wanted her purse, and when he said, “I’m not after that, open the door,” she did. Because even though the car was running, how could she have put it into reverse and gotten away, how could she have ignored that gun? We talked for two hours and I said things that seemed right at the time, about how it wasn’t her fault and she didn’t deserve it, and then we hung up and I stormed out into the darkness, walking late at night into a rough neighborhood, crazy with rage and wanting someone, anyone to mess with me, just mess with me a little bit and I’d gouge his motherfucking eyes out of his motherfucking head because I would have opened the car door, too, I would have seen the gun and opened the door, but no one did mess with me that night.
9, 10, 11.
There were other times, too, when I was alone with a man in his home or mine, at night and in broad daylight, when I found myself calculating how many steps it would take to reach the front door or how loud I’d have to yell for a passerby to hear or, in one case, how likely he’d be to back off if I held up a knife, but in each instance it didn’t come to that, things didn’t go the way they so easily could have gone, the way women always keep in the backs of our mind, and what I’m trying to say is this: my life has been a best-case scenario. It doesn’t get better than this, luckier or more safe.
12.
I’ve more or less aged out of the risk now, by which I don’t mean that the threat is gone because no living person is immune, but I no longer date around. I no longer go to clubs where women must hold their drinks at all times. I no longer have to think about whether my clothes might attract the wrong sort of attention because there is so little attention now, and I’m glad. But I also know this: there will always be something else I/you/she might have done, not done, anticipated, gotten wrong, always a way to take the blame, the persistent questions revolving around should, shouldn’t, did, didn’t. Only here’s the thing: I fell into the arms of strangers. I crawled under the lifeguard boat. I drank and experimented with drugs. I pulled my own pants down. And men did not rape me.
Why is that? Because men, so many men, are so fully capable of not raping. And do I feel fortunate? Do I thank my lucky stars? Of course I do. I take no credit for the way things have gone. But know this: feeling grateful is not the same as being told to feel grateful. And luck is no explanation, and no consolation, for anything that matters.
Michele Morano is the author of the travel memoir, Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain (University of Iowa Press) and the forthcoming essay collection, Like Love (Ohio State University Press, Fall 2020). She teaches creative writing and chairs the English Department at DePaul University in Chicago.
Photo courtesy Pixabay
