Accidental Joy
One dog August late afternoon, I walked along the outskirts of a local college campus. I traveled the border of crabgrass and oak forest every day on my way home from the library. I walked in the grass barefoot, carried my Dr. Scholls sandals in one hand, and sang songs like Hurts So Good and Centerfold and Rosanna like I was a rock and roll singer.
I must have been singing when it happened. I don't remember now. I don't remember much. Someone stepped out of the dark canopy of trees and grabbed me around the neck. He covered my mouth with one hand and dragged me into the forest. He had a knife. He raped me. I remember only bits and pieces of the attack. I don't remember his face or his height. I don't remember how long it lasted. I can still hear his voice, though, the way he hissed "don't look at me" over and over and over. I can still feel his arm tight around my neck and his hand clutching my mouth. And I remember one part with multicolor slow motion clarity, the part where he grabbed my right hand and deliberately broke three fingers, one by one, pinky, ring finger, middle finger, broke them like chicken bones. Sometimes I hear that cracking pop in my dreams.
Two months after the rape I kept waking up sick and disoriented. My fingers were healing, bruises fading from purple to yellow brown, but my stomach felt worse, like fire and gunpowder water and it radiated to my throat, to my head. I didn't know I was pregnant until my breasts swelled and my back began to ache. I looked in the Yellow Pages and called an abortion clinic, the one that advertised a sliding scale fee and twilight sleep, and told the receptionist I was young and raped and poor and pregnant. She told me to bring six hundred dollars in cash, a friend to drive me home, and an empty stomach the next morning. I didn't have a friend or six hundred dollars so I stayed home. I had a baby daughter. I gave her up for adoption.
I can talk about the time surrounding the rape in short plain sentences. I can talk about it without flinching or closing my eyes, without fear in my voice. I had therapy where I hit rigid foam pillows with a plastic baseball bat and yelled things like Bastard and I Hate You and Motherfucker. I laid back in a stuffed easy chair and my therapist told me to picture white light surrounding me, expelling all evil, white spirit light filling my lungs and heart and womb and brain. And time passed. Long, dry time.
I keep talking about this in different ways, I'm a sheepdog circling the events, corralling them, moving them into storage pens for slaughter. I'm a blue merle sheepdog with watery eyes and a limp and all I know is to keep circling, keep circling, get those sheep together, keep them from running free, I don't want them to break formation.
I grew older, became a grown-up with two failed marriages and four children and a happy riptide Avon Lady career. My birth daughter grew up, too, grew up without me in the cold north, in a kind conservative family, in a home just a few miles from the site of the rape. She called Catholic Charities this summer, and Catholic Charities called me and I said yes, I want to meet my birth daughter. Yes.
This past weekend I drove my sister's stick shift car from Manhattan to New Jersey. Dog hair covered every square inch - brown dog hair and curdled dirty baby cups and half-chewed pretzels and I held a print out map of the winding way to my daughter's small town between my legs. As I drove I thought about things. I thought about my life, all the years between the rape and now, all the adventure of campouts and school field trips and pizza Fridays, all the x's in my cross stitch life map, how I added color and texture and design, how I always left a corner undone. I'm so different now, I thought. I'm not that girl in the woods, that girl with broken fingers and no friends. I'm not that girl. I thought of the photos my birth daughter sent me, how she looks like that girl, looks like a young me. I know so little about her, I thought. She looks like me but she's a stranger.
I drove around a tall hill with granite outcroppings and fall colored trees. I turned at a blinking red light and shifted down, coasting to a stop at a small house in the woods with two decorative scarecrows in the front yard and a pumpkin on the porch. My daughter stood at the edge of the gravel drive. I was half an hour late, but she stood waiting, her hands behind her back, and I stepped out of the car and backwards in time, two decades back, to the night of her birth, into her arms.
I don't understand life, or death, or anything, really. All I know is you get what you get. I got an old new daughter, not a stranger, a real child just like her sister and brothers, and my heart and arms and mind couldn't find a difference. I saw those years of exile disappear, rise off my body like fever during the short walk from my sister's car to the edge of the drive, to my daughter.
I don't remember the words I used when I told her about her birth. I don't remember anything I said to her or anything she said to me. But somehow a million million busy cells swapped stories and places and memory and we found ourselves on the black lake behind her house, in a blue paddleboat with a candy striped canopy, alone on the lake, drifting, drifting, not paddling, resting, letting the water transform two decades into glass shattered reflection, into nothingness.
Thanks to Carroll and Victoria for the title of this entry.
9:55:51 AM 
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