[Untitled]

 

Siobhan Dolan

 

 

 

I remember the time that Paul locked the basement door.

 

Or, at least I sort of do. The bits of real memory that I have from that day flicker around like pieces of old film reel: patchy and stained. I remember his hand pushing down the lock on the glass sliding door and the little click it made as the lock engaged. I remember that it had that thick, damp smell that most unfinished basements do; a smell permeated the same room in my own house. I remember how yellow the light bulbs were, how they gave the gray, concrete walls a sickly sort of glow. I remember the feeling of my tiny feet sinking into the orange cushions of the couch,. I remember that the fabric was scratchy and made my toes itch.

 

I don’t remember Paul’s face, as strange as that sounds. I remember the zip of his fly, his hand closing in around the top of my arm. I remember being in his hold one second and leaping away the next. I remember his body as he advanced towards me, how despite the fact that he was only two years older than me and was probably barely four-and-a-half feet tall he suddenly seemed as big and immoveable as a skyscraper. I remember the twisting feeling of wrong in my stomach and the way he cried out my name when I leapt towards the stairs, but I don’t remember his face.

 

I remember fumbling with the deadbolt at the top of the stairs, and now I’m glad that an eight-year-old boy didn’t have the foresight to realize that locking a room from the inside meant that it could also be unlocked from the inside. I remember blowing by his mother and the look of surprise on her face as I did so. I remember her appearance exactly, from the baggy denim shirt that she wore to the loose curls that were coming out of a bun that she had hastily scraped together on her head. I remember lunging for the front door and, sprinting around the shared garden, into my own house.

 

The door slammed behind me once I got inside. Even though my house was only fifteen feet away from Paul’s, my breathing was ragged and sweat trickled down the hairs at the back of my neck. My mother’s location and her actual reaction when I told her what had happened are memories that have been lost, film that was left on the cutting room floor. I do know that she was about to take a shower, that from my room where I was told to sit and wait I could hear the stuttering sound of the water coming on in the bathroom. My window was open and the lightness of the spring air did nothing to alleviate the sudden heaviness in my gut. Panic had faded and a viscous, dark emotion coated my insides, pulling my heart down, down, down until it seemed to sink into the floor.

 

Guilt.

 

I had told on Paul. Paul, my friend, my neighbor. His voice soon came from under my window, faint and worried, wanting to know that everything was alright, wanting my comfort. Dashing over to the window I pressed my face to the open crack, calling down that it would be okay, that I was sorry if I had gotten him in trouble. Everything would be fine, I would take everything I said back. But what he did, and the fact that I hadn’t hidden it, was not something that I could take back.

 

Seven years later in an eighth grade health class, I learned that one in three women are sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. Thinking back to that spring day, panic came, just as it had in the basement and my heart sunk again, deeper than the floor, deeper than the foundation of the school I was in. Within the first six years of my life I had become part of that statistic.

 

After realizing the significance of that day, my outlook on a lot of things changed. This isn’t to say that it became the only thing I thought about— I was removed enough from the situation that it was easy just to feel a passing disgust whenever it came to mind. What it really did was cement in my mind the reality of the world that we live in. I started carrying my cousin’s old swiss army knife around with me everywhere. I learned that if I was out alone at night that I should walk with my keys stuck in between my fingers like a set of deformed Wolverine claws. Throughout high school, when I frequently stayed very late after classes had ended because of various clubs, I knew that no matter how hot it was inside the building, no matter how much I just wanted to get out of that school, I should stay inside until my mom arrived to pick me up. It’s not like I was the only one who did all of this. These habits were not overreaction by a survivor of an attempted assault or a practice that was pushed on me by an overprotective mother, but commonplace safety procedures that most girls I knew growing up followed despite the fact that we all grew up in a small, quintessential Massachusetts town that, outwardly, was as nonthreatening as can be.

 

A few years, a couple self-defense courses, and a college acceptance letter later I landed here at Emerson College in Boston, MA. While I had been in and out of the city throughout my childhood, I had never lived here. Compared to the quiet collection of condos that I grew up in, Boston might as well be an entirely different planet. Boston is a city, a state capital; it is full of bright lights and constant noise.

 

A few weeks ago, at an admittedly late hour, I was on my way home from the T with a friend when we were caught up in a group of people waiting for the light to change at the Tremont/Boylston intersection.

 

“Hey,” said a guy in the group, staring directly at me and my friend. “Hey ladies! Ladies! C’mere a minute!”

 

I am not always the smartest person. I am easily irritated, easily provoked. I know better than to respond to a man catcalling me in the middle of the night. I know that, at best, I’ll walk away still feeling skeeved out and, at worst, I could get hurt. I know the danger of being locked in a room with a bigger, more aggressive member of the opposite sex, and I know that it’s even more perilous to be trapped by his side by a flow of heedless traffic.

I responded anyway.

“I’m alright,” I said. “We’re just gonna wait here.”

“Nah, c’mere, just give me a lil kiss!”

“Seriously, dude,” I said, trying to keep the mood light and friendly. “I think we’re good for tonight. Thanks, though.”

“C’mooooooonn, girl. Just a lil one.”

 

“Sorry,” I said, fumbling around for an excuse. “I...uh...I have a girlfriend. I’m dating a

woman.” For the record, this is a lie. However, I thought that if anything would put him off, this would be it. If I could give the impression that even if I wasn’t “taken” that he would have no chance because of my sexuality maybe he would leave me alone.

 

No luck. “Aw, that’s cool! Gimme a hug anyway!”

 

Luckily, the walk signal finally decided to change and my friend and I were able to dash to the other side of the street.

 

Maybe it’s the freshness of this incident, but something about it leaves an even sourer taste in my mouth than thinking about what happened at Paul’s does. At least when I think about that afternoon in his basement I can think of reasoning for why he may have done what he did— he could have locked the door not to keep me in, but to keep his parents out, he could have grabbed my arms not to try to force me to do anything, but to keep me from going and getting him in trouble, he could have taken his pants off not out of any real knowledge of sex but out of a desire to try something he had seen Mommy and Daddy doing through a crack in the bedroom door. Twelve years have passed and I have over a decade’s worth of new memories sitting atop the ones from that day. How can I be sure of any malicious intent on his part? The older I get, the easier it is to see the whole thing not from the eyes of a scared six year old girl, but from the view of an adult. Meanwhile, the (probably drunk) man who was angling for a kiss on that Saturday night might not have intended to do anything worse than catcalling, he did. His insistence combined with my need to get out of the situation caused me to lie about myself to a complete stranger; it made me use my sexuality as a weapon against sex. I don’t know if I’m more grossed out with him, or with myself.

 

Last week, when I came home from a party, I did not come alone. By that, I do not mean that I brought a special guest back to my suite for the night, but that I requested that a male friend of mine accompany me on the walk back to Piano Row because I did not feel like dealing with the rowdy, and sometimes handsy, nightclub patrons that clutter the sidewalk there alone. Strangely enough, walking down the street on the arm of a man was enough to get me a free pass— no heckling, no grabbing, no nothing.

 

I want to be clear about something: neither that afternoon, sometime in the spring of 2002, nor any experience I’ve had with sexual harassment since have destroyed me. They have not defined me. I am a person, real and whole. I have been to that basement since the incident with Paul and I walk that stretch of street where I was heckled every single day. My experiences have not weakened me, and they have not “made me who I am” any more than owning a dog has. This is to say that yes, they have affected and changed me, just as every experience that I have ever had or will have has affected me and changed me.

 

This, me finally sharing these stories, is not bravery. Do not take it as such. There is no fear for me to overcome in putting these words down on a page. The wounds of my experience in Paul’s basement were inflicted on me before I really knew how to feel their hurt, and at this point they are nothing more than scars. There is no fear for me to face so this cannot be bravery. This is frustration and anger and the simple need to be heard.

 

I’m not telling these stories to make anybody scared. I’m not doing it to garner pity— A) this isn’t a sob story or a cry for attention, B) pity does literally nothing for anybody, and C) most women in this country have at least some experience with something ranging from street harassment to full force assault. I’m not special. I’m not “damaged.” I’m telling these stories because it’s something that I’m not supposed to do, something that I haven’t been allowed to do. It’s not considered polite to talk publicly about assault or sexual violence— but why? What I want you, the reader, to ask is why? Why can’t I tell my story if I’m comfortable doing so? Is it for the comfort of the survivors— I will not call them victims— of sexual assault and rape? Perhaps. Is it for the comfort of their families, who don’t want to think of a loved one being hurt? Maybe. Or is it (in my mind the more likely answer) to keep everybody else comfortable? I remember, back when I was first learning how to uphold the beauty standards that are expected of me, I was told that the hair that grew on my legs and under my armpits and around my bikini line was something that no one wanted to see. It was unwanted by those around me, so I should remove it— hide it for the comfort of people who did not wish to acknowledge that I was not something smooth, airbrushed, and out of a magazine. I think that this topic, sexual violence, is not so different. Those who do not have these experiences, these memories, do not want to hear about it because it reminds them that we are not shining and unmarked beauties marching out from a centerfold, but real people with pulses and pockmarks and personalities that are not all rainbows and butterflies.

 

Why is it that these people, people who have never gone through this, get to determine when I speak about this aspect of myself and who I talk about it to? Why is it that when I was a child I felt guilty for telling my own mother what had happened in Paul’s basement? Why did I feel guilty when I had done nothing wrong; because regardless of Paul’s real intentions that afternoon, he was the one in the wrong. Why was I made to keep his secrets? What the fuck kind of justice is that?

 

Well, I refuse. I refuse to feel ashamed of the fact that someone has touched me in a way that is inappropriate when I am not the one at fault. I will not carry the blame and I will not be bullied into hiding things that have happened to me as if I have done something shameful. I have enough things that I’ve done that I need to feel shame, or sadness, or regret about; I don’t need to stew silently with a demon that is not even mine.

 

 

 

Sources

Allen, Zariya, Belissa Escobedo, and Rhiannon McGavin. "Changing the World, One Word at a

Time! (Somewhere in America) | The Queen Latifah Show." YouTube. YouTube, 4 Nov.

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Dunham, Lena. "Love & Sex." Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What

She's "learned" N.p.: n.p., n.d. N. pag. Print.

 

Febles, Eduardo. "A family in exile, a poet in the making." The Gay & Lesbian Review

Worldwide 22.2 (2015): 32+. Academic OneFile. Web. 8 Mar. 2015.

 

Waxler, Jerry. "Understand Self by Looking Back: Memoir of an Examined Life." Memory

Writers Network. N.p., 17 Oct. 2014. Web. 08 Mar. 2015.