As July of 1984 seeps into August, I decide to go back to work. I don’t think about what, exactly, I will do once I get there. My job requires me to go into dark theaters, a prospect that fills me with dread. But alone in my house I feel trapped, waiting for DAVE to come for me. I need to escape, and in my fog of fear I transform the newsroom into an underground shelter filled with sympathetic friends and lifesaving provisions. My colleagues will shelter me.
This may well be the most naïve thought I have during this whole time period.
The first day, the walk from the door to my desk feels like a perp walk. I know that everyone knows. It’s a newsroom—of course everyone knows. Reporters, tireless gossips that we are, have honed our skills into a professional asset. We regard secrets much the way we regard the free booze at weddings and wakes: We can’t stay away from the open bar or the open secret.
No one says anything to me. People avoid walking past my desk, or pretend to be looking somewhere else if they happen to pass me on the way to the cafeteria. I feel alone in a spotlight, observed by an audience who does not want to be there and keeps averting its collective gaze.
I have nothing to do. Nothing. My editor, all hard-boiled bluster, comes straight out of the era of The Front Page, when reporters wore hats and chased scoops and their editors fumed. He gets his gray hair buzzed every couple of weeks and wears a wide tie with short-sleeved dress shirts, and, since they will not ban smoking in the newsroom until the following year, he lights up a cheap cigar every afternoon. I consider this a hostile act against a staff he makes no secret of disliking.
In my absence, he has assigned all my reviews and stories to other people, and when I return he doesn’t bother to give me anything else. He can barely look at me. I sit at my desk and try to look busy. I try not to cry. After a couple of hours, I tell my editor I have to go home. He nods but doesn’t look at me.
I go back the next day, and the next. Now I feel like I’m carrying an exotic disease and have been quarantined without anyone having informed me. No one says anything. I know they’re embarrassed; I know they have no idea what to say to me. In any case, they’ve probably picked up a signal I don’t even know I’m giving off, a signal that says, “Please don’t talk about it.” They’re right. The prospect of receiving a simple “I’m sorry” unnerves me, because I know I will have no control over my reaction. I’ve experienced this before: When my father had a heart attack on a tennis court and died when I was twenty-two, it was such a shocking and unexpected event, I could not bear for anyone to offer sympathy. If they did, I would mutely nod and turn away, tears pooling in my eyes.
I can’t allow myself to cry at work. We’re in the old, open newsroom, cubicles still in the distant future, with desks pushed against desks, phones ringing, people talking. The place still has the pneumatic tubes that once carried copy upstairs to the typesetters. It would serve nicely as the set for a revival of The Front Page, if it weren’t for the massive computer terminals that have landed on the desks like spaceships from a 1950s sci-fi movie, one computer for every two reporters.
It is also, still, a very male atmosphere. A couple of years later, I will share a computer with the TV critic, a woman whose breasts are as big as mine—a cross I have borne from seventh grade on. One day, a reporter will saunter over and say, “What is this, the pulchritude corner?” Smiling. Waiting for one of us to answer.
The band of brothers gets away with this stuff. They also get away with leaving in the middle of the day to go to “lunch” at the Headliner, the joint on the next block where the smoke forms thick clouds over a wooden bar, the bar stools have cracked vinyl seats indented with the butts of generations of reporters, and the bartenders will run a tab if they know you. More than once an editor has had to send a copy aide over to the Headliner to haul a reporter back to the newsroom for an assignment.
So there I am, in the middle of the old newsroom, trying to look busy. You’ve heard the Tom Hanks line, “There’s no crying in baseball”? Well, there’s really, really no crying in newsrooms. I can no more cry in that open newsroom than Carl Bernstein could have cried on Bob Woodward’s shoulder in the middle of the Washington Post newsroom.
Then, a few days in, two colleagues approach me.
The first is a reporter I’ve talked to a couple of times. We’re just starting to be friends. She asks if I want to go for a walk. We go outside, into the glorious summer afternoon, and she keeps her eyes on her feet hitting the sidewalk as she tells me about the time she was in high school and went for a hike in the ravine near her school. It was the middle of the day. There were three boys, older than her. Two held her down while the third raped her. Then they traded places. She didn’t know them. She never reported it and never told anyone; she was afraid her immigrant parents would freak out, not let her out of their sight, and even, possibly, not let her go away to college. She never again went for hikes alone, and she had never talked about it until now, with me.
The other is a colleague I don’t know at all. An editor asks her to talk with me, and so I find myself in the cafeteria, sitting across from a woman so tough I will always imagine her wearing military fatigues. You can bet no one in the newsroom comments on her pulchritude. I can tell she doesn’t want to be here, talking about her own rape. Her jaw tenses with every word. She tells me it happened in the parking lot of the newspaper, at night. A stranger slashed her tires and waited for her to get to her car, then approached her to offer help. She doesn’t go into detail. She did report it, the police came, but they never caught him.
Both women tell me what happened to them as though they’re reporting it to the police—just the facts, no emotion, exactly the way I told the people who needed to be told. They don’t talk about the things I need to hear and they need to say: how scared they are now, how they wake up in the middle of the night sometimes with their hearts pounding, how hard it is to be alone, how they never go outside at night, how they battle this feeling of shame but still feel it to their core.
None of us talk about it with each other again.
And I’m OK with that—more than OK. I don’t want to talk about my rape or anyone else’s.
Therapists, though, consider it their job to get you to talk about it—“it” being whatever you’re trying not to talk about.
My husband and I go to the first therapist, in what will be a long line of therapists, shortly after I go back to work. She has filled her office with floor cushions and pillows, but no furniture. We lean into the cushions while she sits on top of one, like a Yogi. The first thing she tells us is that most marriages don’t survive this kind of trauma. She gives us a statistic, a pretty alarming one, though I won’t remember it later; maybe 80 percent? I barely listen to her warning. I’m sure it won’t happen to us. We separated once, in Minneapolis, but we got back together stronger than ever. The therapist’s statistics must be for marriages that are already in trouble. I don’t realize that I’m indulging myself in more magical thinking of the “It won’t happen to me” school. I should have learned from the rape: Nothing happens until it happens to you.
Next, the therapist has us both tell our stories of the rape. I tell mine the usual way—just the facts, ma’am—though by now I’m leaving out some of the details, the ones that made the cops wince and look away. My husband tells her about the hospital, the police station, the lineup, and the parole hearing. He cries as he tells it.
Neither of us mentions the one thing that we most need to talk about to save our marriage: the hit-man plan. Which is dead, as far as I know. After several more crying fits, I’ve finally persuaded my husband to stop the plan, though I have this nagging doubt that keeps surfacing. Maybe one day a cop will call and tell me David Francis died in jail. Or maybe Johnny or one of the jail guards called the whole thing off, and my husband found someone else. I have no idea how far he went with it.
The hit-man plan, dead or not, marked the moment when I felt I couldn’t trust my husband to be rational. His plan, and my bitterness about having to deal with it when I was most vulnerable, opened a fault line in our marriage.
On our second appointment, the therapist asks me if I feel angry. In fact, yes, I feel plenty of anger—toward my husband, however, not the rapist. But I can’t talk about the plan. It embarrasses me, deeply, and I’m not sure if she would have to report my husband to some authority.
“No, I’m not angry,” I say.
She feels that I need to allow myself to be angry. She gives me one of the many pillows in her office and tells me to pretend it’s the rapist.
“Punch him,” she says. “Yell at him. Tell him what he did to you. Let it out.”
I give the pillow a halfhearted punch.
“Now go ahead and yell,” she says.
I stare at the pillow. After some thought, I decide I have nothing to say to the pillow.
“I can’t yell at the pillow,” I say. “I’m not sure I’m feeling anger right now.”
I believed that for the longest time. Twenty-three years later, when I decided to look for David Francis, it occurred to me that the therapist was right: My anger was there, waiting to attack, but I was afraid of it. It was too large, too unruly, too honest. There was no way I, raised to be a polite girl, could roar my terrible roar, and gnash my terrible teeth, and show my terrible claws.
So I banished my anger to a faraway cave, and in its absence I felt … nothing. Emptiness. I was a ghost, my body made of vapor. Maybe it couldn’t feel anything.
I welcomed this absence of feeling. I decided that it meant I’d recovered. In my inner dialogues, I talked to myself like the nastiest right-wing curmudgeon on talk radio, telling myself, “Get over it! You survived. Now stop thinking about it, stop acting like a victim, and for God’s sake stop whining. Just get on with your life.”
So I did. After three sessions, we quit seeing that therapist.
And after the trial, we stopped talking about the rape. We both thought about it—a lot, as it turned out—but we did not mention it.