Rapist and many other men who rampaged up and down the Pacific Coast without nicknames.
Two or three years before this narrative begins, a fifteen-year-old runaway had been kidnapped near San Francisco, raped, and had her forearms chopped off by her rapist, who assumed she’d bleed to death in the culvert he dumped her in. She lived to testify and went on to make an ordinary life for herself. He murdered another woman when he got out of prison. Her story haunted me and the friend who’d given me the desk. I found it again in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, where Lavinia is raped and has her hands cut off and her tongue cut out to silence her but manages anyway to convey who ravaged her. And again in Greek mythology, when, after he rapes her, Philomela’s brother-in-law cuts out her tongue to silence her.
I’ve heard and read many accounts by women who were impacted by a single brutal attack, but the horror for me lay in the pervasiveness of this violence. I had a sense of dread in those days, a sense that the imminent future of my body might be excruciating and horrifying. There was a mouth of rage that wanted to devour me into nothing, and it might open up almost anywhere on earth.
3
I had never been safe, but I think some of the horror that hit me was because for a few years I had thought that maybe I could be, that male violence had been contained in the home I grew up in, and so I could leave it behind. I wrote once that I grew up in an inside-out world where everywhere but the house was safe, and everyplace else had seemed safe enough as a child in a subdivision on the edge of the country, where I roamed freely into town or into the hills that were both right out the door. I’d yearned to leave home and planned to do so since I was a child in single digits making lists of what to take to run away. Once I left home I was almost never in danger inside my home again, but by then home often felt like the only place I was safe.
At twelve and thirteen and fourteen and fifteen, I had been pursued and pressured for sex by adult men on the edge of my familial and social circles, and I’d been the target of street harassment in other places. There are absences so profound that even knowledge of their absence is absent; there are things missing even from our lists of the missing. So it was with the voice with which I could have said No, I’m not interested, leave me alone, I realized only recently.
We often say silenced, which presumes someone attempted to speak. In my case, it wasn’t a silencing because no speech was stopped; it never started, or it had been stopped so far back I don’t remember how it happened. It never occurred to me to speak to the men who pressured me then, because it didn’t occur to me that I had the authority to assert myself thus or that they had any obligation or inclination to respect my assertions, or that my words would do anything but make things worse.
I became expert at fading and slipping and sneaking away, backing off, squirming out of tight situations, dodging unwanted hugs and kisses and hands, at taking up less and less space on the bus as yet another man spread into my seat, at gradually disengaging, or suddenly absenting myself. At the art of nonexistence, since existence was so perilous. It was a strategy hard to unlearn on those occasions when I wanted to approach someone directly. How do you walk right up to someone with an open heart and open arms amid decades of survival-by-evasion? All this menace made it difficult to stop and trust long enough to connect, but it made it difficult to keep moving too, and it seemed sometimes as though it was all meant to wall me up alone at home like a person prematurely in her coffin.
Walking was my freedom, my joy, my affordable transportation, my method of learning to understand places, my way of being in the world, my way of thinking through my life and my writing, my way of orienting myself. That it might be too