It could have been me who found herself in a moment in which my fate was not my own, my body was not my own, my life was not my own, and I hovered on that brink and was haunted by it for a few years that reshaped my psyche in ways that will never be over. Which was, perhaps, the point: to remind me that I would never be entirely free. This violence mostly targets girls and young women as an initiation rite, a reminder that even after you cease to be a frequent target you’re vulnerable. Each death of a woman was a message to women in general, and in those days I was tuned in to survival with a kind of dread and shock at finding out that I lived in an undeclared war. I wanted it declared, and I have to the best of my ability declared it myself from time to time.
It was popular in the media and polite conversation to pretend that murderers and rapists were marginal men, them and not us, but during that time a white man who was a bank vice president strangled a teenage sex worker in my suburban hometown not quite thirty miles north of San Francisco while his wife and daughters were at Girl Scout camp. It was the era of the Night Stalker and the middle-aged white man known as the Trailside Killer (who raped and killed women hikers on the trails I hiked on) and the Pillowcase Rapist and the Beauty Queen Killer and the Green River Killer and the Ski Mask Rapist and many other men who rampaged up and down the Pacific Coast without nicknames.
Two or three years before this narrative begins, a fifteen-year-old runaway had been kidnapped near San Francisco, raped, and had her forearms chopped off by her rapist, who assumed she’d bleed to death in the culvert he dumped her in. She lived to testify and went on to make an ordinary life for herself. He murdered another woman when he got out of prison. Her story haunted me and the friend who’d given me the desk. I found it again in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, where Lavinia is raped and has her hands cut off and her tongue cut out to silence her but manages anyway to convey who ravaged her. And again in Greek mythology, when, after he rapes her, Philomela’s brother-in-law cuts out her tongue to silence her.
I’ve heard and read many accounts by women who were impacted by a single brutal attack, but the horror for me lay in the pervasiveness of this violence. I had a sense of dread in those days, a sense that the imminent future of my body might be excruciating and horrifying. There was a mouth of rage that wanted to devour me into nothing, and it might open up almost anywhere on earth.
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I had never been safe, but I think some of the horror that hit me was because for a few years I had thought that maybe I could be, that male violence had been contained in the home I grew up in, and so I could leave it behind. I wrote once that I grew up in an inside-out world where everywhere but the house was safe, and everyplace else had seemed safe enough as a child in a subdivision on the edge of the country, where I roamed freely into town or into the hills that were both right out the door. I’d yearned to leave home and planned to do so since I was a child in single digits making lists of what to take to run away. Once I left home I was almost never in danger inside my home again, but by then home often felt like the only place I was safe.
At twelve and thirteen and fourteen and fifteen, I had been pursued and pressured for sex by adult men on the edge of my familial and social circles, and I’d been the target of street harassment in other places. There are absences so profound that even knowledge of their absence is absent; there are things missing even from our lists of the missing. So it was with the voice with which I could have said No, I’m not interested, leave me alone, I realized only recently.
We often say silenced, which presumes someone attempted to speak. In my case, it wasn’t a silencing because no speech was stopped; it never started, or it had been stopped so far back I don’t remember how it happened. It never occurred to me to speak to the men who pressured me then, because it didn’t occur to me that I had the authority to assert myself thus or that they had any obligation or inclination to respect my assertions, or that my words would do anything but make things worse.
I became expert at fading and slipping and sneaking away, backing off, squirming out of tight situations, dodging unwanted hugs and kisses and hands, at taking up less and less space on the bus as yet another man spread into my seat, at gradually disengaging, or suddenly absenting myself. At the art of nonexistence, since existence was so perilous. It was a strategy hard to unlearn on those occasions when I wanted to approach someone directly. How do you walk right up to someone with an open heart and open arms amid decades of survival-by-evasion? All this menace made it difficult to stop and trust long enough to connect, but it made it difficult to keep moving too, and it seemed sometimes as though it was all meant to wall me up alone at home like a person prematurely in her coffin.
Walking was my freedom, my joy, my affordable transportation, my method of learning to understand places, my way of being in the world, my way of thinking through my life and my writing, my way of orienting myself. That it might be too unsafe to do was something I wasn’t willing to accept, though everyone else seemed more than willing to accept it on my behalf. Be a prisoner, they urged cheerfully; accept your immobility, wall yourself up like an anchorite! I was driven to go somewhere that was partly a metaphysical urge to make a life, to become and transform, to do, but literal travel expressed that passion and let off that pressure; I was never going to give up walking. It was a means of thinking, of discovering, of being myself, and to give it up would have meant giving up all those things.
One day when I was walking past a small park just east of the neighborhood, a passerby I’d never seen before spat full in my face without stopping. Even with other people around, I was alone: I was harassed more than once on the bus home while everyone pretended nothing was happening, perhaps because a man in a rage intimidated them too, perhaps because in those days people more often considered it none of their business or blamed the woman. Men would make proposals, demands, endeavor to strike up conversations and the endeavors quickly turned into fury. I knew of no way to say No, I’m not interested, that would not be inflammatory, and so there was nothing to say. There was no work words could do for me, and so I had no words.
Usually I’d look down, say nothing, avoid eye contact, do my best to be as absent, unobtrusive, insignificant as possible—invisible as well as inaudible—since I was afraid of that escalation. Even my eyes had to learn deferential limits. I erased myself as much as possible, because to be was to be a target. Those men conducted a conversation, sometimes a shouting match, with my silence. They shouted I owed them words, obedience, deference, sexual services. But the time I told off a man—a well-dressed white man—who was following me, in the same kind of profanity-laced language he was using to me, he was genuinely shocked and then threatened to kill me. It was daytime in a tourist district, so he probably wasn’t going to try, but it was a frightening reminder of what speaking up achieved.
It was as though their desire was overtaken by resentment or fury that the desire would not be satisfied, that the overtures would be rebuffed, and since they knew that in advance, the desire and rage emerged together in obscene, scornful propositions, in language that demonstrated their right to say those things and my helplessness to not suffer the insults. The rage: it was as though they expected me to obey strangers, as though any woman belonged to any man, as though everyone, anyone, owned me except me. The words: they had an overabundance, and I had none, even though I lived for and by words the rest of the time.