The Last of Her Kind, page 10
On the radio, a lawyer who was not involved in the case said that Manson would probably go free because of lack of evidence against him. Sasha was one of those who wanted Manson to go free. “You see how it is, everyone freaking out because a couple of millionaires get killed, when people in the ghetto get killed all the time.” Instead of turning the radio down, Sasha screeched over it. “Good for Manson, shaking up the Establishment, putting the fear of God in them, showing what could happen to the whole bad lot of motherfuckers tomorrow! You know, he spent most of his life behind bars. He’s what the system made him. He’s America’s worst nightmare, and he’s just what America deserves. And he’s supposed to have killed—what, seven people? And everyone’s acting like it’s a bigger crime than My Lai? Is that not fucking amazing? And all because the victims were white and rich!”
Sasha’s parents’ house was in a part of the city where I had never been, and I was astonished to see that it actually was a house and not an apartment: a three-story gray house with black trim and its own garage.
“You grew up here?” I asked.
“I did indeed, but I’ve hardly set foot in this place in three years.”
On the way there, she had told me that her parents were out of town. “I think they’re coming back soon, though, which is why I have to get this done.”
The house was smaller than it had looked from outside. It had the feel almost of a playhouse. I remember ornately patterned rugs, unmatched furniture, a jungle of potted plants, and what I mistook for African sculpture. (“Nah. It’s from the Pacific Islands.”)
I helped Sasha bring in the boxes and suitcases. In the kitchen, which was ultramodern and spotless, Sasha took two Cokes from the refrigerator and opened them. As she handed me one, the doorbell rang, startling me so violently the can slipped from my grasp. Sasha was calm. Though she had not mentioned it, she’d been expecting the people she now went to let in. Two men and a woman followed her into the kitchen, the men about Sasha’s age, the woman closer to mine. The exceptional thing about them was the length of the men’s hair: short, very short, like straight men’s.
“These are my friends,” Sasha said. They did not look happy to see me. “This is George,” she told them, leaving their own names unsaid. They stood there looking at me uncertainly, without speaking. “George is cool,” Sasha said, and when that failed to break the ice, “Give her a break, man. She’s just been raped.”
“No,” I said quickly. “I mean—I mean yes, but I’m okay.” I would have fled the room had they not been blocking the doorway. One of the men said, “Oh, wow, man,” and turned and walked out.
I was holding a sponge. The can I had dropped had gushed a puddle of Coke. I had been about to clean it up when Sasha returned with her friends. Now I started to get down on the floor, but Sasha said, “Hey, don’t you do that,” and grabbed the sponge away. I thought she meant she would clean the mess herself. Instead, she tossed the sponge in the sink, and deliberately stepping into the puddle with both feet (she was wearing boots), she began marching in place, splashing Coke over everything under waisthigh. She laughed, and the man laughed, but the woman glanced at her watch and said with a singsong warning inflection, “Sa-sha.”
“Right,” said Sasha. “Okay, why don’t you three get started? George, you come upstairs with me.” She led me out of the kitchen without drying her feet.
As we passed through the living room, I saw that the man who had left the kitchen was lying on a sofa, smoking a joint. I saw also that Sasha’s friends had brought suitcases, too.
Sasha’s parents’ bedroom smelled like a greenhouse. There were plants downstairs, too, but the ones in here were particularly exotic-looking, and some were in bloom. “But these have just been watered,” I said.
“Yeah, the cleaning person comes when my parents are gone.” Like Ann: a gun to her head could not have got her to say maid. “Make yourself at home. That’s a very comfortable bed.” I sat uncomfortably on it. It was half smothered with pillows, all different sizes and covered with different fabrics. I knew that some people decorated their beds like this, but where I came from it was not done. In our own home, there was always just one small flat pillow for each bed. The unbidden thought of those meager pillows and their old, stained, sour-smelling cases filled me with despair.
Sasha was rooting in the purse she had brought upstairs with her. Now she simultaneously produced a small plastic bag full of whitish powder and asked me whether I’d ever done smack before. I had, and in that instant I forgave Sasha everything.
On a bedside table were some framed photographs. Sasha took one and laid it flat, carefully shaking some of the powder onto its glass surface. I supposed those were her parents, the bride and groom under the powder under the glass, but I wasn’t really interested. I was too preoccupied with what was about to happen. I was also thinking about Sasha’s driving, how incautious she’d been, once even running a red light. And all along she’d been carrying.
She said, “I wish I could join you, but I have to stay straight tonight. This shit may be stronger than what you’ve had before, but you’ll like it. And you deserve it after what you’ve been through. This will make you forget, baby. This will make you forget.”
I was glad the room had its own bath. If the stuff was really good, I might throw up. I snorted the powder and lay back against the comfy pillows. Why should I mind getting high by myself?
I had noticed a stereo set downstairs, and here was another one in the bedroom. Next to it was a stack of records, which Sasha was now looking through. “I swear,” she said. “My parents have the worst fucking taste.” She tossed aside albums of movie sound tracks: Camelot, My Fair Lady. “Who listens to this shit?” She tossed aside Sinatra. Rosemary Clooney. Barbra Streisand! But in spite of herself, as she kept looking, Sasha started to sing “If Ever I Would Leave You,” from Camelot. She must have liked it once: she knew all the words. She had a beautiful voice, and she wasn’t even trying. My eyes filled with tears.
“Hey, this’ll do.” She had found some Ravel.
There were headphones with a cord long enough to reach the bed. Sasha had me put them on before she started the recording of Boléro.
“Now,” she said. “The only thing you have to do is stay right here and relax.” She tweaked my nose as if I were a child, and she left, closing the door.
Not too long after, I had to get up. In the bathroom I vomited, very gently, very naturally, if that is not too strange to say, to the rhythm of Boléro. I felt better afterward, but then I had been feeling pretty good before. Back to the bed on boneless legs, back under the headphones. I was in the pleasure dome now: body heavy, head light, and that fluttering in the blood, as if butterflies were trapped there. The only thing I had to do was relax. Okay. You could have pulled me limb from limb like taffy.
For those who do not know, here is the way a friend of mine once described it: “The first time I ever did heroin, I thought God had bent down from heaven and kissed me on the lips.”
I hadn’t eaten any dinner, but I was not hungry. I was not thirsty. I had left my cigarettes downstairs, but I did not crave one. Had something been bothering me? I did not remember. Ann was right: Sasha was a genius.
When Boléro came to an end, I got up and started it over again. I did this more than once. It was a piece I had never heard before that night (and the kind of music I would never listen to today).
Downstairs, they were packing as much as they could carry into the boxes and suitcases. When, between nods, I floated down there, no one paid attention to me.
Later I was vaguely aware of sex happening somewhere in the house.
At some point I crashed for real and did not wake until morning. I was still completely dressed, down to my sneakers, and had slept on top of the covers. The headphones were beside me, but the stereo was gone. So was the one in the living room, and the television, and everything of value, including the sculpture. So were the people. In the kitchen—the Coke had dried and the floor was all sticky—I found a note: “You were so out of it we decided to let you be. You can get home by yourself.” Yes, that was not a problem. I could get home by myself—so long as there was no hurry. I drank about a gallon of water, then went back upstairs, and the moment I lay down I fell asleep again.
When I woke the second time, it was because someone was waking me. A hand on my shoulder was squeezing, shaking. “Hey, come on now, we can’t let you sleep anymore. Come on, wake up, wake up now.” Sasha was back. She was sitting in a chair by the bed. She had changed into a tailored suit and aged about thirty years. Her widow’s peak had turned white, and her face tragic. She said, “Who are you?” And I, enlightened, shocked, and dry-mouthed, croaked, “Sasha’s mother.”
“No, my dear, that’s me. Who are you?”
Footsteps pounded up the stairs, and a man strode into the room. Face like a storm. He jutted his chin at me and said, “So she finally woke up?”
I gathered they had not just arrived. They had found me but had not woken me right away. This gave me a chill. They had “creepy-crawled” me, like the Manson people. Except, of course, this was their house.
The way the man—Sasha’s father, who else?—was looking at me told me I should hurry and get out of there. I got unsteadily to my feet and started babbling: how sorry I was, didn’t know how this could have happened, must have fallen asleep, but now I’d be going, leave them in peace—
“You’re not going anywhere till we call the police.”
“The police!” Sasha’s mother looked at her husband as if he had kicked her. “For god’s sake, Louis. We are not going to call the police.”
“No?”
“No, Louis. We are not going to call the police on our own daughter.”
“Oh, no? And what are we going to do, then?”
“Well—” She had turned back to me. I could tell she was more upset with Louis than she was with me. “We’re going to send this little girl home, and then I’m going to go to bed and cry until next Tuesday.”
“You realize the insurance company is going to call this an inside job. We won’t be able to collect a penny.”
“I realize.”
“I suppose we should be grateful she didn’t blow the place up.”
Sasha’s mother shut her eyes, and I knew exactly what she was seeing. It had happened only weeks ago, in Greenwich Village. The survivors—exactly who and how many not known—staggering out from the flames and the collapsing debris to escape before police arrived. Three had not escaped, had not survived; and the two, a man and a woman, who’d been making the bomb in the basement had been ripped apart. The woman just about Sasha’s age. A town house, like this.
“Louis,” Sasha’s mother said in a voice that was somehow both harsh and imploring. “Take her out and get her a cab.” She got up then and went into the bathroom, quietly closing the door. I remembered vomiting to Boléro the night before and hoped I had not left any mess.
I was afraid to be alone with Louis and his rage for even a minute. I ran ahead of him down the stairs but waited so that he could open the door. As I stepped outside, he asked me if I had money for a cab, and I shook my head. When Sasha and I left the campus the night before, I had taken nothing with me but my cigarettes, and somehow I had managed to lose even them.
“Then I guess wherever you’re going you’ll just have to walk.”
Slam.
That’s what he thought.
Within a few blocks I had collected twice the fare. (Hard to explain, but back then, for a little while at least, people liked to give money to hippie panhandlers. They enjoyed picking up hitchhikers. People who would never or could never belong to the counterculture were often sweetly benevolent toward it.)
On the way home in the cab, smoking a Kool I had bummed from the driver, I thought of the wedding photograph lying flat on the bedside table where Sasha’s parents would find it, coated with white dust. I had a fleeting fantasy of being alone with Sasha’s mother, throwing myself into her arms, and telling her everything, beginning with the rape.
I returned to a campus in uproar. American troops had just invaded Cambodia. There were calls for a student strike. In the following days, demonstrations took place at colleges across the nation. In Ohio, National Guard troops opened fire on students at Kent State, wounding nine, killing four. Ten days later, at Jackson State, in Mississippi, police killed two and wounded twelve. (Ann would make much of the fact that the second event got nothing like the attention of the first, surely because the Jackson State victims were black.) Before the semester was over, hundreds of schools, including Columbia, had shut down. So ended (early) our sophomore year. Ann and I saw little of each other those last days. But we both had come to the same decision. When school reopened that fall, it would be without us.
For me, even before the turmoil of that spring, college could seem like the very home of chaos and confusion, where students with absolutely no need for money risked jail by pushing drugs, and a Barnard senior, also in no financial need, worked as a prostitute at a fancy brothel near the U.N.; where rich kids lamented not being poor and made a fetish of poor blacks; where blacks claimed that no white teacher could criticize a black student’s work and that criticism was just a white idea anyway; where one teacher got a letter telling her she’d better watch her Jew ass; and where a black classmate whose book I picked up by mistake threw the book at my head, shouting, “Now you’ve given me bad luck for a month!” Where Charles Manson was a hero, or at least “one of us.” Where some people would have nothing to do with me because I had a brother who’d killed Vietnamese. One night that semester, we all flew out of our beds: someone had planted a bomb under the statue of Alma Mater. The noise might have been a shock, but the act itself surprised no one.
As for Ann, she had come to believe, like Sasha, that despite the growth of student power in recent years the universities remained entrenched Establishment institutions, in bed with corporate America, committed to preparing the young to take their places in a corrupt and undemocratic society. Unlike Sasha, Ann had no intention of going underground, but she could not live the privileged life of a student anymore. We were both disillusioned; we both wanted to move on, but for different reasons. Ann was still looking to change the world. And I (though I saw it only later) was looking for romance.
I once spoke to a group of young women about being raped. This was years after it happened, when I had already been married twice and had had my two kids. I had made friends with a Women’s Studies professor, and I had told her my story, and it was she who asked me to speak to the small group of young women, all of whom were doing some sort of research on women and sexual abuse. I did not want to do it, but she was my friend.
I sat on my friend’s living-room floor with a glass of white wine, and I began by saying that things had been different in 1970. I explained that women were different then, that they could not have been as afraid of getting raped, for example, because at that time you saw women hitchhiking everywhere, even pregnant women and women accompanied by children. They went on the road, and they got into cars and drove off with strange men—this at a time when rape, like all violent crime, was on the rise in America—and who in her right mind would do this today? I told them about the two hippie girls who’d hitched from Denver to Manhattan and crashed in our freshman dorm and who, when we asked them hadn’t they been afraid, said no, because “if a guy wanted to ball, we’d ball’im.” I said that when I was finally reunited with my sister, who had hitched back and forth cross-country several times, she told a similar story, and we even joked about what a golden age that had been for truckers—you see, we could laugh about it then. But nobody in my friend’s living room was laughing now. I told them about the lunatic fringe of the sexual revolution who thought it a crime that anyone should ever have to resort to rape at all, and how Solange once confessed that for years of her life she would sleep with anyone who asked. It was political, she said. Because for some, free love meant what it said, like air, like water, and no shame. And I told them how at that time you could find plenty of women who thought it rude or unfeeling to sleep with just one man if there were two men in the room. (Still no laugh.)
I brought up Eldridge Cleaver and how—though it was known he had raped black women for practice and then moved on to raping whites as an “insurrectionary act”—at least half the women I knew would have been honored to have sex with him. Sex with a Black Panther would have been the height of their dreams.
I explained why I would not go to the police, and why I did not want to tell my boyfriend, and how I had not told my mother for the same reason I had not told her about my stolen suitcase or about the way Miss Crug used to take me in her arms to talk about college applications—because it was only asking for trouble, that. Everything always had to have been my own fault. But that was my mother, and that was another story. I said it had been very interesting, as the years passed, to see whom I found myself telling and whom I did not: this friend but not that one, my first husband but not my second. (Later: my daughter but not my son.)
I said I thought walking alone in that deserted area of the park after being warned not to had been irresponsible and just plain dumb. No, not that I was asking for it, listen carefully, that is not what I said. I said—hoping not to be misunderstood but fearing I would be, dreadfully so—that if I was going to be raped, and if there could be such a thing as a best time for it to happen, I had been raped at such a time. I said I was sure it had helped that at that particular time, sexual intercourse had been demystified, that it could mean not just a casual but a meaningless act, something you might easily do with a person you didn’t know or care about, someone you never intended to see again, someone to whom you were not even attracted, someone you might even dislike, someone you would almost certainly not have had sex with if you’d been less high or less lazy or tired. I cited Woodstock, the movie, the scene in which two very young kids are interviewed: “We ball and everything but like it’s really a pretty good thing because there’s plenty of freedom because we’re not going together and we’re not in love or anything like that, you know …”
