Three Women - Lisa Taddeo Page 0,132

he can’t get there emotionally yet. It’s easier for him to do this, to make her come with his mouth, to give her what she wants without being locked into her.

She wears lace and nothing else and does everything she can with her body to bring him in. He keeps denying her and she keeps insisting. Finally he relents and they fuck, and it’s intense and clear and fast; it nearly comes out of her nose when he finishes in her mouth.

Sloane lies there afterward, feeling not la petite mort but the opposite—a fullness, nearly. She knows that at the end of the day, aside from the health of their family and dearest friends, there is nothing more important than the fact that she wants her husband above all others, and he wants her above all else. That despite the hardships she’s come from and the million little things a day that make her feel bad, there is nothing better in the world than this communion.

There are envious people who say things behind her back, who call her the same names that Maggie Wilken was called after she came forward, that Lina Parrish was called in high school after she was raped by three boys. Of course, Sloane knows she has the luxury of not heeding what other people say. She is white and pretty and the owner of a business. She comes from money. She knows all the ways the world ticks in her favor. She also knows all the things it will use to try to bring her down. But when she is with her husband, it is just the two of them—even when it’s not.

Naturally, my mother died. All mothers do, and they leave behind a trace of their wisdom, their fears, and their desires. Sometimes everything is obvious, marked for burglars. In my case, I needed a black light.

There was a beauty in how little my mother wanted. There’s nothing safer than wanting nothing. But being safe in that way, I’ve come to know, does not inure you to illness, pain, and death. Sometimes the only thing it saves is face.

In the early fall Arlene Wilken is still thinking about the new handwriting samples. She is convinced that this is a way forward for them; that good things can still happen. She tells Maggie how hopeful she feels. But Maggie doesn’t share her mother’s outlook.

She’s frustrated, enraged even, by the thought that for a lot of people to even consider for a moment that she didn’t make the whole thing up, they must have proof from an expert.

During the trial and thereafter, Maggie and her family were turned into a cliché. Nuance was shelved in favor of the word troubled. When Maggie was young and it was winter, Mark Wilken would get out his snowblower and build his children a giant hill in the backyard to sled on. It took him hours, but he knew how much they loved it. Arlene Wilken got sober three months before her husband’s death and is still sober today. Maggie’s parents drank, but they were functional, and above all, loving. The love was swept under the rug. Meanwhile Aaron Knodel’s good deeds were enumerated in the press, in the school, and on the street.

On one of the last days of the trial, Maggie was on her way out of court. A heavyset, gray-haired man in his fifties shuffled toward her and said, “For what it’s worth, I believed you, right away. I believed you since day one.”

His eyes were kind and though it had become difficult for Maggie to trust men she didn’t know, she was grateful to have a stranger on her side. Outside her family and close circle of friends, he was the only one. The only person who believed her, or who had the temerity to say so.

Meanwhile Aaron Knodel was supported implicitly by the other teachers, the students, the newspaper reporters, the gas station attendants, the grocery store cashiers. People who had never met him, never met Maggie. Everyone cast a vote for Aaron Knodel before the case even went to trial.

“The world wanted to think that this nice-looking man wouldn’t have done what he did,” Arlene says. “It made them feel safe to defend him.”

Indeed it is the same world that wants to keep lauding only those who have already been lauded, those who have, throughout history, been accepted. Watching the way so many people reacted to Maggie’s story was unsettling for me. Even those who believed Maggie’s version of events opined that she had been complicit. What, after all, had Aaron Knodel done? Aaron Knodel is not a rapist, they said. He is a great teacher, with a family. He doesn’t deserve to have his life wrecked over this.

But what Aaron Knodel was accused of is, arguably, nearly as damaging to a child as a nonconsensual event might have been. Society treats girls like the one Maggie was as adults who have the faculty of making good decisions. She was a bright child with some hardship. A brilliant teacher like Aaron Knodel could have been the catalyst that propelled her into a lifetime of confidence and greatness. Instead, he became the opposite.

Many people, men and women alike, who otherwise accepted Maggie’s truth, said to me, Well, she wanted it. She asked for it. But to me Maggie Wilken did not ask for it. She accepted it, the way any child accepts any decoration, any gift. Women have agency, but children do not. Maggie’s desire for love, for someone to tell her she was a valuable being in the world, was attacked, in the end, for its impudence.

I observed the same dynamics when I spoke to others about Sloane and Lina—especially the people closest to them, their friends and neighbors. It felt as though, with desire, nobody wanted anyone else, particularly a woman, to feel it. Marriage was okay. Marriage was its own prison, its own mortgage. Here is a place for you to lay your head and here is a food bowl for the dog. If you fuck around, if you try to build a steam bath, may everything you fear come to pass. My mother’s final lesson to me—never to let anyone know I was happy—I had in fact absorbed many years earlier, as a child. My father would buy me an unauthorized mermaid, something that changed color for spoiled girls in the bath. He never told me not to tell my mother. I told myself.

For now Arlene Wilken has some sense of reprieve. She would like to tell her husband there may be a new way forward. She would like to convince her daughter. But Maggie is quiet, distant, measured. She has learned not to show too much to anyone anymore. Anything she says can and will be used against her.

On top of that, the timing is wrong; she can be understood for not being jubilant. The handwriting discovery comes on the heels of Maggie Wilken finding out that Aaron Knodel is the new assistant coach of the Sheyenne golf team. There he is on the school’s website, smiling, with his hands folded behind his back. He is heavier, broader, than he was during the trial. He is less pale. He looks healthy and pleased as he stands beside the fifteen girls, some of them brunettes, some of them blonds. A redhead or two.