at a party when she was seventeen by a boarding-school senior named Ethan Post. Ethan didn’t do any sports except golf, but he had six inches of height and fifty pounds on Patty and provided discouraging perspectives on female muscle strength as compared to men’s. What he did to Patty didn’t strike her as a gray-area sort of rape. When she started fighting, she fought hard, if not too well, and only for so long, because she was drunk for one of the first times ever. She’d been feeling so wonderfully free! Very probably, in the vast swimming pool at Kim McClusky’s, on a beautiful warm May night, Patty had given Ethan Post a mistaken impression. She was far too agreeable even when she wasn’t drunk. In the pool, she must have been giddy with agreeability. Altogether, there was much to blame herself for. Her notions of romance were like Gilligan’s Island: “as primitive as can be.” They fell somewhere between Snow White and Nancy Drew. And Ethan undeniably had the arrogant look that attracted her at that point in time. He resembled the love interest from a girls’ novel with sailboats on the cover. After he raped Patty, he said he was sorry “it” had been rougher than he’d meant “it” to be, he was sorry about that.
It was only after the piña coladas wore off, early the next morning, in the bedroom which, being such an agreeable person, Patty shared with her littler sister so that their middle sister could have her own room to be Creative and messy in: only then did she get indignant. The indignity was that Ethan had considered her such a nothing that he could just rape her and then take her home. And she was not such a nothing. She was, among other things, already, as a junior, the all-time single-season record holder for assists at Horace Greeley High School. A record she would again demolish the following year! She was also first-team All State in a state that included Brooklyn and the Bronx. And yet a golfing boy she hardly even knew had thought it was OK to rape her.
To avoid waking her little sister, she went and cried in the shower. This was, without exaggeration, the most wretched hour of her life. Even today, when she thinks of people who are oppressed around the world and victims of injustice, and how they must feel, her mind goes back to that hour. Things that had never occurred to her before, such as the injustice of an oldest daughter having to share a room and not being given Eulalie’s old room in the basement because it was now filled floor to ceiling with outdated campaign paraphernalia, also the injustice of her mother being so enthralled about the middle daughter’s thespian performances but never going to any of Patty’s games, occurred to her now. She was so indignant she almost felt like talking to somebody. But she was afraid to let her coach or teammates know she’d been drinking.
How the story came out, in spite of her best efforts to keep it buried, was that Coach Nagel got suspicious and spied on her in the locker room after the next day’s game. Sat Patty down in her office and confronted her regarding her bruises and unhappy demeanor. Patty humiliated herself by immediately and sobbingly confessing to all. To her total shock, Coach then proposed taking her to the hospital and notifying the police. Patty had just gone three-for-four with two runs scored and several outstanding defensive plays. She obviously wasn’t greatly harmed. Also, her parents were political friends of Ethan’s parents, so that was a nonstarter. She dared to hope that an abject apology for breaking training, combined with Coach’s pity and leniency, would put the matter to rest. But oh how wrong she was.
Coach called Patty’s house and got Patty’s mother, who, as always, was breathless and running out to a meeting and had neither time to talk nor yet the moral wherewithal to admit that she didn’t have time to talk, and Coach spoke these indelible words into the P.E. Dept.’s beige telephone: “Your daughter just told me that she was raped last night by a boy named Ethan Post.” Coach then listened to the phone for a minute before saying, “No, she just now told me . . . That’s right . . . Just last night . . . Yes, she is.” And handed Patty the telephone.