Even when I spoke to others, my words seemed useless. Late one night, a huge man whose muscles swelled his tracksuit followed me off a bus—not my usual bus line, but one that at that hour ran more frequently through another neighborhood and left me farther from home—and shadowed me on my several-block walk. Nearly home, I saw a uniformed security guard and asked him for help, thinking that after all this was his job. He turned more slowly than I did—and as he did, I saw the man following me step behind a fence—and said I was imagining things, and left. The stalker reappeared. I made it home.
Another night, after another late-night ride on the same bus line, I was mugged on the same street—surrounded by tall young men, one of whom pinned my arms down while I shouted at passing cars that did not stop, and while I imagined that all my worst fears were about to come to pass. I lost a whole satchel full of negatives and prints for a photojournalism class along with other schoolwork. The photography professor did not seem to believe me, and my grade suffered from the makeup work that was not as good as the work that was stolen. I was training to be a journalist, but my capacity to report was doubted. My words failed again. And again. After another attack, I told my boss—an elderly child psychiatrist—about it because I needed to explain why I wasn’t doing my job well that day, until I realized he was erotically excited by the attack. My friend who was almost murdered had faced the same kind of response from the men around her afterward.
I was often told that I was imagining things, or exaggerating, that I was not believable, and this lack of credibility, this distrust of my capacity to represent myself and interpret the world, was part of the erosion of the space in which I could exist and of my confidence in myself and the possibility that there was a place for me in the world and that I had something to say that might be heeded. When no one else seems to trust you, it’s hard to trust yourself, and if you do, you pit yourself against them all; either of those options can make you feel crazy and get called crazy. Not everyone has the backbone for it. When your body is not your own and the truth is not your own, what is?
I was twenty-one or twenty-two when I went to a New Year’s Eve party at the home of gay friends in suburban Marin County, the county of the Trailside Killer and that homicidal banker. My boyfriend at the time was running the lights for a concert, but was supposed to come and join me at midnight. He was delayed by his diligence, and I was sad that we were not celebrating the New Year together. I didn’t have a car in those days, I didn’t want to ask anyone for a ride, so I set out well after midnight to walk to my mother’s house about a mile away, where I could slip in and sleep on the couch without disturbing anyone. Perhaps she was away; that part I don’t remember, but what came before was indelible.
While I was on the main thoroughfare between the two houses, I realized that someone was behind me. I turned around: it was a big man with a shaggy beard and long hair. I walked faster. He was only a couple of feet behind me, not at a normal distance, and we were the only two people out on foot at that hour. It was dark, and the shrubs dividing the dark homes from each other loomed and streamed shadows, and his shadow and mine swelled and shrank from streetlight to streetlight, and cars passed by and their headlights made all the shadows swirl and lurch.
Once I had spotted him he began to speak, a low, steady stream telling me that he wasn’t following me, that I should not trust my own judgment, an accelerated course of gaslighting designed to undermine my ability to assess the situation and make decisions. He was very good at what he did, and his insinuating sentences were disorienting to the very young woman I was. Clearly, he had a lot of practice. I wondered later what harm he had done to other women before and after.
So much of what makes young women good targets is self-doubt and self-effacement. Now I would flag down cars, stand in the middle of the road, make noise, bang on doors, respect my own assessment of the threat, and take any action that seemed likely to get me out of it. I would bother someone, anyone. But I was young and trained not to make a fuss and to let others determine what was acceptable and even to determine what was real. It was many years later that I stopped letting men tell me what had and had not happened.
On that dark boulevard, I behaved as though it wasn’t happening, though I crossed the street to see if he was following me. He stuck to me like a curse. The walk seemed endless, though I was hoping to get to my destination before he attacked, thinking that if I didn’t disrupt the stalemate perhaps neither would he. Cars passed. Shadows swirled. I crossed the street again. He followed. Again. Again. Finally a few blocks before my destination, a man in a sedan pulled up and leaned over to open the passenger door and offered me a ride.
The stalker murmured from very close behind, “Don’t you know that getting into a stranger’s car is the most dangerous thing you can do?” Of course I had been told that over and over, and I hesitated.
Then I got in.
The driver said, “I passed you once and thought that it was none of my business. Then I thought it looked like a Hitchcock movie, so I came back.”
I’m grateful a man rescued me from a man. I wish I had not been in a Hitchcock movie where I needed rescue.
Though I was followed and yelled at and mugged and grabbed and more than once strangers threatened to kill me and men I knew menaced me a few times and others pursued me uncomfortably long after I’d tried to discourage them, I was not raped, though many friends of mine were, and all of us spent our youths navigating the threat, as do most women in most places. It gets you even if it doesn’t get you. All those years, I noticed the little stories tucked away on newspaper back pages, given a paragraph or two, mentioned in passing on broadcasts, about dismembered sex workers and murdered children and tortured young women and long-term captives, about wives and children slain by husbands and fathers, and the rest, each one treated as an isolated incident or at least something that was not part of any pattern worth naming. I connected the dots, saw an epidemic, talked and wrote about the patterns I saw, waited three decades for it to become a public conversation.
4
The threat of violence takes up residence in your mind. The fear and tension inhabit your body. Assailants make you think about them; they’ve invaded your thoughts. Even if none of these terrible things happen to you, the possibility they might and the constant reminders have an impact. I suspect some women push it down to some corner of their mind, make choices to minimize the reality of the danger so that it becomes an unseen subtraction of who they are and what they can do. Unspoken, unspeakable.
I knew what was lost. And the weight of it crushed me then, in those years when I was starting out, when I was trying to make a life, have a voice, find a place in the world. I did all those things, but I joked later that not getting raped was the most avid hobby of my youth. It took considerable vigilance and wariness and constantly prompted changed routes through cities, suburbs, wild places, through social groups, conversations, and relationships.
You can drip one drop of blood into a glass of clear water and it will still appear to be clear water, or two drops or six, but at some point it will not be clear, not be water. How much of this enters your consciousness before your consciousness is changed? What does it do to all the women who have a drop or a teaspoon or a river of blood in their thoughts? What if it’s one drop every day? What if you’re just waiting for clear water to turn red? What does it do to see people like you tortured? What vitality and tranquility or capacity to think about other things, let alone do them, is lost, and what would it feel like to have them back?