In her first year of college, at a Halloween party in a fraternity house, my mother was raped by a pre-med student called Buck Whitney.
True name redacted. But you can be sure his name was something like that, like Brock or Biff or Whit or Trent. Something white. Something rich. Something rapey.
My mother had never been a frat party girl. She was the girl who turned in English papers stapled in the left-hand corner, then clipped in a binder, with her name at the top of every page, just in case. Proofread. Double-checked. No allowance for random accidents.
She went to the party because her roommate begged her to. Her roommate was a red-haired, wild-eyed girl from Georgia with a weakness for Jack Daniels and lacrosse players. She wanted a sober companion, someone who could chaperone, play referee. Someone who knew when to take the pot of rice off the range top just before it burned.
The roommate made it home, alone, safely, at 3 a.m. She thought my mother got tired of playing babysitter and left her. She thought she’d find her in the dorm, already sleeping. But that wasn’t what happened.
*
I knew none of this until I was an adult. The woman I knew was the stapler-binder woman, too organized for accidents, too sensible for chances. She wasn’t someone who spun a wheel and hoped for the best. She didn’t suffer fools gladly, or at all.
I remember every year on Christmas eve our family would watch It’s a Wonderful Life. My brother and I eating reindeer-shaped cookies. My parents sipping red wine. When little Mary Hatch told George Bailey she didn’t want coconut on her sundae and he loaded it down with coconut anyway, my mother slammed her glass down.
“She said she doesn’t like coconut, you jerk!”
For my mother, that was practically a swear. And who doesn’t like George Bailey? Giving up his college money so his brother can go to school. Taking the rap for poor, bumbling Uncle Billy. Although he was a jerk to Mary at times. Playing keep-away with her robe. Smelling her hair, then yelling at her that he doesn’t want to get married, ever.
But still. We all looked at her. My brother said, “You tell ‘em, Mom!” My father smiled. My mother looked at me. Eyes a little glazed with wine, not smiling at all. “Don’t ever let a man tell you what he thinks you want,” she said.
There was another time. I was thirteen, and we were in line at the supermarket when an old man behind me pulled my long ponytail. “Such pretty hair,” he said. “I bet your skin is as soft as flour.”
Or maybe he said soft as flowers, but I heard it as flour, which seemed dry and powdery and not something you’d want to be compared to, and I was going to say that, but then he ran his hand up my arm, to the edge of my sleeveless top. “So soft,” he repeated, and I froze as his hand touched my bra strap. I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move.
But my mother did. She stomped down on his foot, hard. Did something with her arm that sent him spinning away.
“If you touch my child again I’ll kill you,” she said, pulling me out of line, leaving all our groceries in the carriage, leaving the old man to gabble that he meant no harm, that he had a daughter of his own, that she lived in Portland.
“Portland, Oregon,” he said. “Not Portland, Maine.” As if that made all the difference.
“I guess those self-defense classes at the Y worked,” I told my mother later, in the car, and she said yes they did, and she was signing me up.
But she didn’t tell me then. She didn’t tell me until the second round of chemo didn’t work, and she refused a third. She told me how the dean of students persuaded her to let the school “handle this matter in-house.” How Biff or Whit got off with a written warning. How she left school before finals, didn’t even finish the semester: my mother, who’d been 4.0 every year of high school.
She told me how she met another man. Someone kind, someone gentle. The man I’ve always called father, even though I look nothing like him, or like my brother.
She left me to do the math. To spin that wheel, even though I’m afraid of where it might land. Like my mother, I’ve never liked games of chance.
