by Alison Mandaville
Rape
This is not an essay about rape.
This is an essay about memory and forgetting.
Judge
Seven years ago, I found myself writing, revising, and sending two-page, personal, in-depth letters to Jeff Flake and Susan Collins, both Republican senators representing states where I have never lived. It is unlikely they would ever read the letters.
Summary: Do not confirm the nominee for associate justice of the supreme court who says he cannot remember the girl from his elite boarding school dorm room—his body heavy on her, his hand covering her mouth, his own laughter.
Because:
Lying—bad.
But forgetting—worse.
Crib
The Fucking Club was a game David made up.
David and Ricky both had a fascination with sex. Danny, the youngest of the three, he sought fire. My foster brothers were an exciting, if brief and occasionally terrifying, interval in my life.
We were all forbidden guns. We were forbidden to ask for anything advertised to us on TV. So, we borrowed and built the things we desired.
Who knew a neighbor’s Barbie doll could be crafted into a pistol? All you needed was a little imagination and brutality.
From the basement, or probably from under the porch where the really unusable rain-rotted boards, old lawnmowers, and desiccated opossums lay encircled by electrical cords and their nearly hairless tails, the baby crib that had likely been my sister’s was disassembled and dragged out—appendage by appendage—to serve as the barred walls of a clubhouse. Propped and tied to the railing on the front porch, the crib sides enclosed the old crib mattress, its baby pee resistant quilted surface crackling with circus animals: a yellow maned lion on blue and red blocks; a seal in a ruff with a ball on its nose.
This was to be a boys’ club. A neighborhood club. David’s eight-year-old and remarkably clear-eyed dream of a club that would make of them men.
I was shooed away. I was left out. I was dismissed. I eavesdropped through the open living room window, managing the broken and noisy weighted casement without notice. Or maybe they didn’t care. Or maybe they liked an audience. Little seemed to happen.
Like most games, it was the planning and anticipation and design work, the details drawn out and well argued, that was the fun part. And.
Boys be. Be boys.
I was not a boy.
Sunroom
Ricky was not, however, David. An oldest foster brother who drew finely shaded horses and soft portraits with pencils and screamed himself awake nightly, Ricky was sensitive. He would someday, when we were both grown and I hadn’t seen him for twenty years, find society just too excruciating, his finely tuned social antenna burned-out. He would retreat to the woods to live in Portland, Oregon’s 5,200-acre Forest Park. Alone.
He did not have David’s entrepreneurial club spirit.
* * *
I don’t know if this is before or after.
Ricky and I are in my bedroom—the sunroom. Surrounded by windows. On my bed. I am about five. He is about ten. We take off our clothes, down to underpants.
My father walks in. Looks. He is angry, a strange angry. He tells Ricky to leave. My father stands there. Tells me only, “Never do that again.” Leaves.
* * *
My father never told me things without explaining them. Overexplaining them. When I was eleven, he drew me diagrams of his vasectomy as he lay in bed one afternoon, recovering.
So, I didn’t know what that was, exactly. Or, I knew—exactly. I can’t decide.
Tickle Time
My father, who read to us each night, who listened to our child ideas—weighed them, and even seriously challenged them—whose attic office was a peaceful and safe retreat for us kids anytime, also had a game he’d sometimes play.
Before or after dinner, lying on the carpet together in the living room, he’d tickle us mercilessly, saying all the while:
Control . . .
control . . .
control . . .
We were meant to endure. Be stoic. Don’t laugh. Don’t scream. Don’t move. Be strong. My brother and I could last much longer than my sister.
My father’s own childhood had been at once remarkable and entirely unpredictable.
He did not drink. He could not bear the loss of control.
He taught me that control. I’m not sure what he taught my sister.
How do our fathers prepare us for other men?
Sister
For years, my sister’s hair was cut shorter than mine. It was very curly and hard for my mother to untangle. And my sister, more than the rest of us, she felt things. The stray and dying cat. The ribs and knots in her socks. The tear of the hairbrush. Was the short hair my sister wore throughout our childhood her own wish or my mother’s best effort to keep the peace?
When I look at old photos, I can see it. Before puberty, she could look boyish, slightly confused.
* * *
They are giving out free balloons at the camera store downtown during the Rose Festival.
“One for the young lady!” I take my balloon, though it is not the color I would have chosen.
“And a blue one for the young man.”
“Take the balloon.” I push my sister forward a little. I know what she’s thinking. But free is free.
As we walk out of the store, balloons in hands, she whispers to me in a small voice of discomfort and some dread, “But he called me a young man.”
* * *
Fifteen years ago, separated by twelve time zones, my sister emailed me. I read the long message in the daytime; it was the middle of the night for her. With sharp anger—“How could you forget?”—she berated me, my offhand and uncertain reply to our mother’s emailed question to the both of us: “Whose was the Girl Scout pin? Clearing old junk.”
How could the small green and gold trefoil pin be hers, my sister demanded, incensed. “Certainly not.” She’d hated the Girl Scout summer camp I’d loved. She’d gone home early from that camp, remember? The other girls had bullied her.
Summers, Camp Arrowhead was an idyll in the forest, located on the north side of the Columbia River Gorge. Mailing address: Washougal, Washington. We campers swam in an aged and shaded swimming pool with fallen leaves and drowned insects. I adored our hippie counselors, who taught us the names of trees and ferns and took us backpacking. My favorite counselor, camp-named Pooh, did not shave her legs because she claimed—with what proof I do not know—that “Native American women didn’t.” All girls at this camp and I have never felt safer and more alive than in that forest.
My sister continued her email volley, keystrokes palpable, transmitting no small fury instantaneously around the globe to me: Did I know that when she was about nine, she’d hidden our father’s best hammer in the art student boarder’s bedroom? The ceramicist, who’d lived with our family for a year in exchange for watching us kids after school. My sister had hoped our mother would kick the obviously thieving art student out.
For David had stolen something. He had kissed my nine-year-old sister on the mouth. And when she reported this, our mother had been too busy to listen. So the story remains.
(Where was my father?)
My sister typed on: Did I know she was raped in college?
* * *
Thing is, I already knew all these things. And more.
One afternoon, the one summer we’d attended camp together, the counselors found me in my tent cabin: “Please, come comfort your sister; she seems homesick.” By then I’d had nearly ten years’ experience with my sister. The idea that I could have helped—that, typical blithe older sibling that I was, I even cared to help—seemed, and still seems, dubious. If my sister was homesick, it wasn’t for me.
I have no memory of what I said to my sister when the counselors brought me to her. She went home early.
Over the thirty-odd years preceding her long-distance email, I’d learned from my sister, and our mother, about the kiss—repeatedly. Maybe I’d never cared enough. Listened well enough.
And, over time, my sister had talked some, although less, about the unwanted sex one night in college with a trusted acquaintance, second story of a student rental house, an event that sent her home to live with our parents. To seek therapy. But she hadn’t before labeled it to me—recognized it?—as rape.
Both grown into feminists, we’d talked for years about academic sexual harassment and the quid pro quo advances from her college geology professor. She’d switched majors, written and published an editorial in the school newspaper about it.
How was it in the 1980s that Smith College, a women’s college, still had no formal process for dealing with any of this violence?
It was as if now, living halfway round the world, I was at once the sister she could tell everything to and someone she had never met.
Maybe there was no good reply to her email. I’m not my best with my sister. I (blithely!) commiserated as a feminist in a world of rape. She, justifiably, felt her personal truth diminished by this expansive view. I later realized she may have been drinking during this electronically lucid exchange.
I am afraid I re-wounded her. I know she wounded me. We’ve spoken a dozen times in the fifteen years since this exchange. Seen each other less. At funerals.
But—and I can’t remember. Surely, I told her about me—didn’t I? Would it change anything?
Truth and Reconciliation
“You were named by some of your classmates as someone who might be able to speak to teacher misconduct.” The voice on the other end of the phone introduces herself as a lawyer working with my former high school and some old classmates. To surface and acknowledge wrongs. A discovery process. To support the girls, now women, whose private school teachers made bad use of their advantage. It is a woman lawyer and her voice is kind.
There is good reason to fear the elite.
I’d heard things. Back then, one friend had revealed that another friend was in a “relationship” with the male religious studies teacher who was—wait for it—married to the female teacher of my elective course in women’s studies.
It was a very progressive private boarding high school near my grandparents’ farm in Massachusetts. My parents were working and living overseas in a country where girls my age were usually getting married, both willingly and unwillingly, and where the closest girls’ high school was 262 kilometers away in another city, in another language.
The lawyer on the phone mentions several names. Students. Teachers. Coaches. Waits patiently.
I recognize them all. I try to align each with classes and sports I remember. I try to be helpful. I can genuinely report “icky feelings” toward certain male teachers. And “not-icky feelings” toward many others. I try to remember why a girl whose name I know but whom I hadn’t been friends with had mentioned me as a possible witness.
* * *
One time a beautiful girl came crying into sophomore English class, inconsolable, her dark eyes swollen behind dark, shiny hair. The male teacher, tall, reddish blond, wearing a tie, seemed strangely distracted, unnerved by her erratic gulps of air. Unusually solicitous (When did our teachers ever attend to our teen dramas?), he stopped class. Took the girl outside to talk. Privately.
The only other thing I remember from that class was reading The French Lieutenant’s Woman—Soon to be a major motion picture!—a 1969 historical novel reviewed as “postmodern” and “meta-fictional.” And all I remember from the book is our teacher’s focus on a sex scene near the end that lasts exactly 90 seconds. I never forgot that number. I looked it up just now. Yup. 90 seconds.
In our class discussion, the teacher asked us, “I mean, 90 seconds. Does anything about that seem weird? 90 seconds?” I remember this clearly: the class of teenagers stayed silent.
* * *
I think I was very lucky.
I would like to think it was because I was not vulnerable. Because I was strong. Because I was argumentative and assertive in class. Because they wouldn’t dare.
Self-Defense
When my child was born a girl and grew into a preschooler, my sister gifted my child martial arts self-defense classes. My sister never followed through to arrange them. I did not remind her.
Lorraine
The girl I was with when we were raped at five by a stranger’s finger in the woods had at least two official offers of marriage by the age of twenty. Hers was a very traditional and large Mormon family with many children of their own. Lorraine was the only girl. Wasn’t she?
Her family ran a neighborhood in-home childcare business. Each mattress on every child’s bed, in a house that seemed full of sets and sets of bunk beds, was enclosed by a yellowed crackly plastic casing that smelled of urine. No sheets. I hated taking the required naps there.
In fourth grade, Lorraine had special permission to use the school restroom without asking, any time. Documented bladder control problems. She confessed to me she had her own hall pass. Which explained, maybe, how she always seemed to smell like pee.
Once, fifteen years before these proposals of marriage, there was a winter storm so wet and windy the electricity went out. Unable to go to evening church as they’d planned, Lorraine’s family herded all us kids down steep wooden stairs into their basement, now an impromptu space for worship, lit by a Colman camping lantern. This was confusing for someone who had never been to any church services and was not Mormon. And because . . . the basement?
My parents picked me up before the DIY service had quite started. They seemed disturbed that I’d been expected to participate.
I did not like my parents to be disturbed.
Now—and I want this part to be funny, some part to be funny but—sometime after Lorraine made her choice and married, her father was charged with sexual assault of several boys. He had been, for decades, a Boy Scout leader. Almost funny.
I think Lorraine may have been living in a war zone no one could not see.
War as a Found Poem
Antonina Medvedchuk, 31, said that
when she woke up to the sound
of bombing on the day
the war broke
out, the first things she grabbed
before leaving . . . Kyiv were condoms
and scissors to use as a weapon
to protect herself.
Every break between curfew
and bombing I was looking
for emergency contraception
instead of a basic first aid kit, she said.
My mother tried to reassure me: “This is not
a war like that, they don’t exist
anymore, they are from old movies.”
I have been a feminist
for eight years, and I cried in silence,
because all wars are like this.
Adapted from “Rape as a weapon: huge scale of sexual violence inflicted in Ukraine emerges” by Bethan McKernan, reporting from Lviv, Ukraine. Published in The Guardian on Monday, April 4, 2022.
Step 8
“Were you at a camp in Northern California in the summer of 1981?” I received this text (or something very like) about ten or so years back. The sender’s name was familiar. Was prep school. Was someone who had traveled in adjacent but not quite overlapping circles. A step up on the cool scale. A step away from interesting. A name and a face and a glamour—maybe.
I did not attend summer camp in Northern California. I never attended a camp in Northern California. I was not someone this boy, now man, had ever hung out with.
“I wanted to apologize for what I did, and I thought you might be the one. I can’t remember. Was it you? If so, I am sorry.”
Gang
Her eye makeup was so thick I admit I stared in fascination and some distraction at the black lashes that trembled, at the tiny clots of mascara that threatened to shake loose, to speckle and stain her corneas as she began to cry. I had called this student into my office about late assignments.
She began a long story of a boyfriend and his friends. His gang, actually, to whom she’d had to prove her loyalty when introduced.
To be initiated into a gang for a young woman is not always the same as it is for a young man.
One by one.
Until her boyfriend, who, she said, did not “participate,” pulled himself loose from the two young men holding him back and rescued her. Held her up. Put his arm around her. Walked her away. Her words.
She told me how kind he was. The boyfriend. How he took care of her. How, since she’d kind of agreed to become part of the group, it was ok, it wasn’t exactly wrong. Right?
Still much newer than I would become at the work of listening, of not judging, of cutting through my own omiiigawdomiiigawd to stay entirely calm and reasonable and let the teller choose the tale, I nevertheless held. I told my student that this sounded really, really awful, and no wonder she was having a hard time focusing in class. Her response seemed entirely reasonable, I told her.
I called someone in the Women and Gender Center, filled out a mandated report of some kind, and got her to the counseling office.
Two weeks later she met with me again, without tears. With words unfaltering, bright, she told me, “The counselor said what happened to me could be charged as first-degree rape. I had no idea.”
I can’t remember whether she reported to the police. I don’t remember if she finished college. I don’t remember her name. I remember her lashes. Her clear surprise—was it joy?—at the word she now could claim. So powerful a word for something that had happened to her.
Definition of Rape:
“The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.”
—United States Department of Justice’s legal definition of rape, updated in 2012 to not discriminate based on gender and that “recognizes that rape with an object can be as traumatic as penile/vaginal rape” (Justice.gov, “An Updated Definition of Rape”).
Women’s Studies
The first time I remember sharing publicly what happened to me was through an essay for a women’s studies class in college. I remember someone sharing a legal definition of rape that included sexual penetration of any part of the body by any object.
I was . . . surprised.
And I thought, Naw. That word seems overkill to describe what happened to me. It was just fingers. I’d always thought of it as abuse or molestation. I squirmed. I did not feel comfortable assuming the label. Rape was terrible, unimaginable, so violent.
What happened to me was quiet. Among green trees. With a friend. A man with such a soft voice. Soft hands. Who beckoned. Who gently moved my underwear aside. A slight burn.
“There,” he said. And released me.
And I’d be lying if today I said that I didn’t find the idea of sex in the woods, of fingers, arousing.
Why am I worrying the label?
When I wrote the essay for my class, something feministy and theory rich and full of the personal as political, I speculated that perhaps the reason I had not, at the time of the rape, told my parents—or anyone, that I can remember—was because I knew there would be a disturbance.
When I gave the essay to my mother to read, blithely forgetting I’d never told her, she was as upset as if it had happened last week.
“You are probably right,” she said about my theory. “I would have killed him.” That made me feel remarkably good.
Dressing Room
When a man is asked by the press in September 2024 about a long-public photo, in which the man appears with his first ex-wife and a woman who has accused him of rape, the man claims, “I never met the woman, other than this picture—which could’ve been AI generated, I don’t know, showed up out of nowhere.”
The man, who is (again) the president of the United States, claims he doesn’t know the woman. A woman who says the man raped her many years ago in a clothing store dressing room. A slam to the wall. A hard kiss. His fingers. Half a penis—or whole, she isn’t sure.
Court transcripts reveal that during a deposition in 2019, when shown the very same photo and asked to identify his accuser, the woman standing and smiling next to him and his then wife, the man takes a look and says, “I don’t know who—it’s Marla. That’s Marla, yeah. That’s my [second ex] wife.”
But she isn’t.
Two and a half decades earlier, in court documents that are part of their divorce proceedings, the first ex-wife—pictured in the photo next to the woman, who on January 26, 2024, a federal jury found had suffered “sexual abuse” from the man—claimed the man, her soon to be ex-husband, had raped her. In another account, the man tears this first wife’s hair out in handfuls. Jams his penis inside. “I felt violated,” she says later, shortly after settling the financial details of the divorce. “But,” she quickly adds, amends, “I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”
Forest
Lorraine and I are playing. Wandering. We have on cotton dresses, I think. Cotton little girl underpants. I think. Lorraine is the daughter of my babysitter, a woman with so many children to oversee in addition to her own that she doesn’t actually watch us. We are cared for by the rules we’ve learned so far, by self-enforcement.
Lorraine has blonde hair. Thick and long. A bit coarse, though not frizzy. I also have long hair. Parted on one side. Brown. A bit smoother, a bit lighter in the waves at the side of my face. Maybe I have a brown and gold-streaked plastic barrette clipped on one side. Maybe Lorraine has her hair gathered in two ponytails, tied with thick-twisted red yarn.
We walk into the woods that edge all the dead ends down near Montgomery Wards. We call it, everyone calls it, Monkey Wards. The houses near there are downhill from my house in my dead end. On the map, it’s not very close. In my mind, though, Lorraine’s dead end is not far.
The forest presses up to all our neighborhoods on many sides. Not the downtown side. Not the Montgomery Ward side. But all the other sides. Past the torn down factory/warehouse/ancient concrete building ruined vacant lot.
Between Lorraine’s dead end and mine is a thick arm of forest. Douglas fir and bigleaf maple. Tree roots in confusing fingers extend into sidewalks and gravel lots. Weeds and rampant ivy at the thriving edges of mystery.
Who, unwatched at five, could stay away?
Lorraine goes first. Maybe the man, who is a stranger I remember as White with brown hair, an adult, beckons to her first. Maybe she volunteers.
She disappears with him into the ferns and trees. Green everywhere. Bits of light.
I wait for a long time.
She returns. Tells me it’s my turn. Stands in the sword ferns to wait.
I am uncertain.
“It’s not so bad,” she tells me.
I go.
It isn’t.
It is.
Alison Mandaville’s poetry, prose, and translations from Azerbaijani have appeared or are forthcoming in Terrain.org, The Stonecoast Review, Four Way Review, Thimble Literary Magazine, Magma, and World Literature Today, among other places. She has received cultural heritage grants from UNESCO and Open Society Foundations for work with Azerbaijani women writers and artists, and has held residencies at Hedgebrook, Blue Mountain Center, PLAYA, Willapa Bay AiR, and Stove Works. She splits her time between Seattle and Fresno where she teaches comics, writing, and literary civics at Fresno State.