FROM PLAY DEAD by Winter Grasso
THREE TIMES
I am a waitress. Sometimes on the drive home from work I want to stop at the liquor store by my house and get a six-pack of cheap beer and drink it on my porch. It is an appropriate time of day and a normal thing to do. I remind myself that I cannot do this because when I drink I get raped. I do not drink at all anymore, not because I have a problem but because I do not know exactly how much alcohol it takes for a man to decide that he will rape me that night and no one else seems to know either. Not that it matters necessarily. I have been raped drunk and tipsy and dead sober. But I miss the stupid complicated drinks. Just ordering them. Long Island Iced Teas taste like rape. Tequila Diet Cokes in tall glasses taste like rape.
Sometimes I think about how hard it will be to love. I will not ever again be a simple woman with whom love is easy. No one will write a January Wedding about me. It will be pulling teeth.
You do not get to be a simple woman when you are raped three times before you have turned twenty-two, and two of them by people who have claimed to love you. Who you really thought loved you. If you love me you could still rape me is what I have learned. The sex can be not rape the first hundred times and then the next time it is rape is what I have learned. I am a person who wants badly to forgive but knows nothing about what is right to forgive (and forgives anyway) (and forgives without an apology).
Some therapists will tell you there is another person living inside of you: a child who can be made pure again. You’ve just got to open the wounds back up and clean them out and hope to heal the right way this time and then your current self and the child, who is you, will come together again and you will finally be the Whole. That is what some will tell you. When things don’t happen to the child of you it is much different. There is no other person living inside of me, no distance to x, there is only my orange heart, with the mesocarp so thin that the acid seeps through and scorches the earth of my insides. The promise and the nature of rotting happens quickly, and then there are the fruit flies and this new heart feels nothing like a metaphor.
To love me you will have to consider your touch. How from behind you could be B**** or C**** or (I didn’t catch his name) for all I know. How the line between good touch and bad touch has blurred together in some ways and is sometimes the same thing or just the prelude.
To love me you will have to know the gun is always hot. That I am scared of you in the animal way of knowing you can hold me down, trick me, love me.
When I am at the bank or the pharmacy (or any public place where there is not much to distract you while you stand in line) and there are only men around me I think about my safe bets:
My dad My brother Wyley John
And then I think, people get raped by their dads and their brothers and their Wyleys and Johns and I assume they did not see it coming either.
Some people say it is good to suffer. But you get to a point where you don’t want to be strong if it means this. I don’t want it if I have to get raped for it. I know that what doesn’t kill me does not actually make me stronger because I am becoming very weak to it all. I want to go on a walk at night, how about that? I want to cry until I die. I don’t want to learn how to use a gun or how to shatter a kneecap. I don’t want to run through the dark with eyeball under my fingernails. I don’t even want to go on the walk at night if it means I may only consider guns and kneecaps and eyeballs the whole time.
I am twenty-two and have been raped three times. I think How many more times will this happen to me in my life if it has happened three times in twenty-two years? I think in formulas and quotients and algorithms. I think nine times is what the math says.
BEAU
Beau is six-foot-four and pretentious for a firefighter, though the hollowness of the display is evident. He is naturally slim but getting older and slower and has not allowed himself to accept this yet, so he has a first trimester beer gut and his body sort of resembles a malnourished child from a third world country but much taller and white of course. I imagine someone filling his stomach with air using a bike pump. He is only in town for three days. About an hour before, we sat on a rock at the cell towers, and he told me how his parents are writers for The New York Times culture section. Now, suddenly, we are in my room, and he holds himself over me awkwardly, balancing on one elbow that trembles and sinks into the mattress, the other arm precariously arched over my shoulder, not touching me, though I don’t believe this is intentional. It is just ungrace. Actually, the only part of him that is touching me is his huge (huge) erection, which is pressed into my thigh. So then I know where this unearned ostentatiousness comes from: his only real offering locked away like that day in and day out.
With a breath that is American Spirits and lunch meat and somehow primally sexy, he whispers from too far away to constitute whispering,
“Don’t worry, I won’t try anything. I know you’re not the kind of girl that fucks on the first date.”
This is less sexy. I have to hold back a laugh. Because I am the kind of girl who fucks on the first date. I know the contract I sign. Really, I am not any kind of girl except a weak one. Too tired for the theatrics of “no.”
This thought distracts me, and I get all forlorn about it inside my head, so I don’t even notice that he has moved down my body, on his knees at the edge of the bed. I don’t really care to engage with this current condition of reality either, so I continue my internal social critiques but with a polite alertness and a touch of drama. I manage a calculated series of gross porny whines, though my body doesn’t move at all. I fake it, not well. I give just enough, not more.
Isn’t it strange how a man will continue to prod pleasure into you as you stare at the ceiling like there is a very serious question written on it? Instead of looking at the question too? He looks up at me complacently, like a shrug but with the eyes, caresses my arm like a rapist (weird, not violent.) I think there is probably some rape in him, something that knows it will disregard certain pleas in ode to his enormous want. He tells me he usually doesn’t do that because one time a girl gave him throat gonorrhea and he should have known by the smell. So, he must really like me. He is unduly sweaty for the labor performed, which agitates me for some reason. I bet he will leave a stain. I fall asleep facing away from him thinking about washing my sheets using the “Heavy Duty” preset, instead of my usual “EcoWash.”
The next day, I promise to mail him a copy of a Joan Didion book I like, which I never do. I drop him at the college dorms where his crew is staying, and he waves me off like a girl. I delete his number as I drive away.
“Three Times” and “Beau” are excerpted from Play Dead, Winter Grasso’s memoir in progress. This is her first publication.