She ran in the early mornings, never having run much before. It relieved her mind. Rover and Lad ran with her though Rover was obnoxious and forced Lad to run behind them in an orderly fashion.
She bought an upright piano for seven hundred bucks with some of Tim’s cash. Her father was upset that she had bought a piano without his permission and she asked why. “I don’t know,” he said. He wearied of her hours of playing so she had a group of 4-H boys move the piano up to Tim’s porch where it would stay until the late summer and early fall weather turned bad. There was a porch light for when she played in the dark but she only used the light when playing a piece she didn’t know well or learning a new one. Other than this she preferred to play in the dark where the music would envelope her pleasantly in the soft arms of the night.
The piano and running were the only things that lessened the intensity of the ache in her heart and mind. The first few days she couldn’t figure out the soreness of her pubis and then it occurred to her that Karl must have been chewing on her vulva. She checked in the mirror and saw that her hymen was intact and noted that many hairs had been uprooted. The last image she could remember before the ketamine totally hit was that Karl had forced her knees back against her chest and was fiddling with his large but limp penis, his face looked strangled. She planned without afflatus on shooting him one day but only when she could get away with it. She had no intention of further damaging her own life. Her gun club friend Marcia had a .22-250 she used for shooting prairie dogs which she could hit at four hundred yards. When the bullet hit the prairie dog’s head it was called “red mist.” She imagined the impact on Karl’s head with satisfaction. If he would do that to a girl he plainly deserved to die.
By the time school started she and Priscilla had drifted apart perhaps understandably because the shared pain was unbearable. Priscilla took to drinking in the mornings and her mother Giselle had to enter her in an alcohol rehabilitation clinic for teenagers in Helena. Sarah’s burgeoning friendship with Marcia helped. In lieu of the oncoming hunting season the three of them, Sarah, Marcia, and Marcia’s diminutive friend Noreen, who was moment by moment pissed off, would go out to the rifle range twice a week to practice. There was something mindlessly cleansing about shooting at a target that was an outline of a deer at varying distances from one hundred to three hundred yards.
Her other friend was the bookish young man with a clubfoot, Terry. For obvious reasons she no longer was interested in distinctly male writers and began reading Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, and Katherine Anne Porter but also the more modern Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro. She had long since decided that if she were to endure her secret she would have to summon up all her resources. She deviously joined the Bible Club. She knew all of the evangelical lingo from her mother Peppy but the sole reason was to throw off her scent for all of the high school boys. They quickly believed that she was “real religious” and that none of them was going to get close to her body. Her distance irritated them so they snubbed her.
There were certain friendship problems because Terry was infatuated with Sarah, and Marcia who was a half a foot taller than Terry was infatuated with him. Her affection seemed odd to Sarah but Marcia said that her dad and three brothers were “blowhard jerk-offs” and Terry was a gentleman. Marcia also said that she knew that all the young cowboys that bird-dogged her only did so because her dad had the biggest and best ranch in the county. Montana most certainly wasn’t the land of opportunity and if a young man or young woman attached themselves to a big ranch they shot up the social scale.
What bothered Sarah most was that her personality began to develop in fixed ways. She had lost her whimsy she thought, and her imagination was dullish except when it was carried away by music and even then it wasn’t as expansive as before the rape. One Sunday afternoon on a lovely Indian summer day she ran up to her secret canyon with Lad and Rover in tow, sat down on a boulder, and wept. This was the first time she had wept since the event some ninety days before and as she cried she felt her insides convulse over the ugliness in people. She wondered how she could possibly accommodate what had happened to her life. She had no choice but to live around it. Rover was upset with her weeping and pranced around as if to coax her out of it. She spoke sharply to the dog which she never did and Rover sulked away and settled under a juniper. She yelled, “Goddamn God,” and ran as fast as she could on a steep trail up the mountain until she was sure her hurt would burst and then she would be done with it.
She began inevitably to look at males as another species. And not that she could summon up any special admiration for women. Her mother, for instance. She would get postcards from Peppy that were relentlessly inane. “It looks like Clyde and me are going to shop for a condo in Maui” or “The governor came to dinner and I was proud as punch to be sitting at the table with this great Republican.” Peppy was a virtual parody of a nitwit but then perhaps she was better than nothing because Sarah’s father was bitterly lonely.
Sarah took to rating men and few could pass through the eye of her cultural needle. Of course there was her hyperliterate pal Terry and her biology teacher, an eager young recent graduate of Montana State University in Bozeman. His enthusiasm for botany, chemistry, and biology was infective for even his simplest-minded students of which there were many. She knew that he had a fresh eye for her but that was merely a fact of life and didn’t mean he was a rapist. And then there was her taciturn father who was an acceptable taciturn father.
One Saturday she went over to Terry’s for lunch. The pump shed and kitchen were normal but the rest of the house was rather grand as if transplanted from New England. His father and brother were away for the fall cattle sale but Terry wanted her to meet his mother. Her name was Tessa and she came from Duxbury, Massachusetts, had gone to Smith College, and had met Terry’s father who was a wrangler at a dude ranch she had visited with her parents. Sarah had heard the gossip that it was her money that thirty years ago had bought the present ranch, a wedding gift from her father.
It was the library that dumbfounded Sarah. There were thousands of books, floor to ceiling, and a moving ladder to get at the upper shelves. She misted her eyes so that all the muted-colored book jackets looked like a landscape painting. Tessa never attended any school or 4-H functions so Sarah heard her voice and its rather alien eastern accent as if she were from a foreign country. She had seen her from a distance jumping a horse over a wooden corral fence in an English saddle which was breathtaking. As Sarah stood in the library Tessa rattled on while Terry was off in a corner looking embarrassed and pretending to search for something. Tessa’s voice was slightly slurred like Priscilla’s mother Giselle when she was taking tranqs to get over a boyfriend. “Excuse my vulgarity but Montana is a dick place and my response is reading but then it was also my peculiar response in Massachusetts.” She held out her hands as if helpless and Sarah reflected that maybe all the women she knew talked the same way because they had the same things to say. “I spend a month a year in San Francisco with my sister and a month in Boston just to keep tuned to the actual world. Out here it’s all staring at cow’s asses. I know Terry never gives you any poetry to read because around this country deep feelings are an embarrassment.”
When Sarah left her head was a knot of pleasant confusion. In this remote part of Montana it was easy to forget there were all kinds of people that you only knew from reading or listening to NPR. She hadn’t been able to relate to television since her childhood Sesame Street, Lassie, and Walt Disney. When she left the lunch which had been comically dismal she carried Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium and Hart Crane’s The Bridge. Tessa had told her that she was welcome to use the library when she wished and that way she wouldn’t be guided by Terry’s taste. Terry, for instance, loathed Jane Austen. The next day, Sunday, she would go riding with Tessa who wanted to show her a spring creek at the back of their ranch. When Terry walked her out to her truck he apologized for his mother’s eccentricities saying she drank too much wine and took too many pills. This irritated Sarah who said she thought his mother was fine. He became downcast so she gave his hand a squeeze.
Sarah knew that her main struggle had to be against a specific dullness that kept creeping into her mind which she knew was an incipient depression. The good thing about meeting Tessa was that it opened up ways to be like her rarely seen aunt Rebecca who was an astronomer in Arizona. She knew at fifteen that if there was a place for her in the world she would have to determine it as opposed to certain characters in fiction and Tessa whose place was determined by their family’s wealth. Of the thirteen girls in her class only three hoped to go to college and four wanted to be stewardesses because they wanted to travel. The other six wanted to marry and stay right where they were.