I was coming down off a serious high, and the police brought me into the drunk tank. It was a busy night and my howling while being raped by a female gorilla (yes, women rape other women) didn’t bring anyone to my rescue. Bruised and bloody in the morning and feeling sick the authorities discovered I was underage and with an abject apology tucked me into an upper scale dry-out clinic.
I met her, Julia at the clinic, she was a volunteer mentor to disadvantaged girls like me. She was an old widowed Jew who, I felt, was there just to see how the outer echelon lived outside her pampered world.
“What was your mother’s name?” Julia asked trying to draw me into conversation during our first meeting.
Why ‘was’ I wondered. “My Mom’s name is Kathy. Some call her Kate, which she prefers. It never stuck. Out of respect I call her Kate.”
“Why isn’t Kate here?”
“Why should she be?”
“Because she is your mother.“ She said ‘mother,’ in a firm verbal underlined tone of voice. Obviously to her since Kate is my mother that obligated her to come and see about me.
“Kate never cared about me, she never will and that is final. Where’s your mother?” I asked.
Julia was old as dirt and I knew her mother was dead. The crackle and a sear of cruelty prevailed over our first meeting. I felt the disfigurement of disdain and anger pull my skin taunt. The emotion was common to me and when not incarcerated often I scoured my horizon for lonely old men to fuck; they were good at it, lonely old men. Afterward they gave me money and use of their shower and I’d stay high for a week. Here I was wasting my time with Julia discussing our mothers. She was silent, looking at me, watching me fidgeting; “so where is she?” I asked again, ‘your mother?”
“With God,” she replied.
“Does she like it better there?”
“I would think so,” she said evenly and looking me directly in the eye.
“Right, like she has a choice. God said that’s it and she had to go.”
“So you believe in God?”
“Sure. God is a male, so He created women making it easy for him and all his males to define hysteria as female.”
She laughed out loud. She laughed with real mirth and her eyes went from a slate gray to a brilliant blue and all the wrinkles in her face softened and crinkled causing a sparkling aura around her face. Her laughter acted as a puncture to my gut. I deflated too quickly and my muscles began to tighten to keep my bones from falling into a heap; pain exhausts the mind. The room darkened and the rank breath of an acidic stomach pushed out of my slack mouth and flattened nostrils. For a moment I wondered if the odor seeped out of my ears and anus. No doubt it did. There she was laughing; a thing that made her ancientness look beautiful while my young taunt body being what all men desired crumbled into a smelly smoldering mop head of humanity.
They incarcerated me for three years in the posh juvenile detention center and for three years I had no choice but to dry out. She came every Sunday afternoon and Wednesday evening.
“What’s it like being a Jew? Did you go through the Holocaust?”
“What’s it like being a Christian? Did you go through the Roman persecution?”
She was good with things like that. She taught me I couldn’t have the same feelings as her and she couldn’t have the same feelings as me. We could compare notes and meet on mutual ground, sometimes. When we couldn’t do that, miles apart in conclusions didn’t stop us from words spoken, lofted, shot like a bullet and even poisoned tipped. Conversation became a complicated game-board. My head often hurt after speaking with Julia. I blamed the burned out synapses in my brain longing to fire but still too frigid to ignite.
“Do you think I’d make a good Jew?” I asked her one day. I felt edgy and thought about the scent of old men and wondered what I would do when I got out of my prison.
“No.”
I sat a moment and stared at her all prim and proper like any well to-do old woman should. I laughed out loud at her and she smiled then almost cried. The brief exchange lifted us from a plateau of several weeks. My physical release would happen soon and the future looked dark and my body felt the old hungers for hard sex and mind numbing chemicals. Looking at her hiding her tears behind her smile I thought of our first conversation. Had we come full circle or as Julia liked to say spiraled up? We were miles apart culturally and never closer spiritually at that moment and I wanted to maintain the exhilaration of pain and separation which drew us together in understanding but I felt the descent of reason budging in and wanting to analyze what just happened. Julia sensed by despair. “Women need women,” she said in a way of explanation.
I began to talk of my rape, why I ended up in a better place than all of my other drug induced cohorts. She frowned slightly and leaned forward listening, intently–interrupting only to bring my language up when I felt the power of hopelessness overcome me.
“Genitals,” for “cunt.” “Penetration,” for “fucked,” and so on. I was sweaty and chilled when I finished telling her of my night in lockup. There was no reason for me to tell her of that experience and when I finished hiccuping and sputtering my way through, fighting the urge to sob out my anger and helplessness Julia was gray and thin lipped. I had made a mistake, she would talk of either forgiveness or injustice but she did not, she gave to me what I had just given to her; a life story.
“My husband came from a long line of Jews–as you call me. Some of his family wore the traditional garb. He was more liberated in his thoughts that my very conservative family and I found his conversation good though some of his personal philosophy wanting. Though he celebrated the holidays and the Sabbath, his diet wasn’t kosher, as his wife I would correct that in him I was sure. Our families arranged our marriage, you see. Even in the United States some practices this. It was many, many years ago. Coming from a very wealthy family my dowry was large, and I was nervous about men because of that fact. The arranged marriage was necessary; but I wanted to feel a part of my ancient heritage and to this day I do not find any fault in my desire. He was brutal. He could only come to a sexual climax by cruelty. My children, I have three who lived, were begot in horrific ways. It was not their fault.”
She was silent for a few moments, the two of us horrified as if the earth had gone dark and the rumble of an earthquake had shaken us out of a mundane conversation. “What happened? How did you survive?” The burn of my life story still trembled from my fingertips and left me shivering with cold. How would I feel about my life when I was her age?
“I had him murdered. I could not stand one more rape. Divorce was an option but he would then have access to my children through visitation rights, I could not risk their minds if their father’s appetites should turn toward them. I had run away with the children but he would find me.” She stared into the corner of the room, I could not read her expression, it seemed shadowed even though we sat in an opened sunlit place.
“What happened? How are you here?”
“I got away with it dear. I paid for his demise and no one is the wiser, except now for you.”
Staring at her snow white hair, glistening and glowing within the streaming sunlight I thought her bright blue eyes must have been the culmination of her beauty in youth for even as I gazed upon her they blazed with intelligence and something else…. cunning?
“Dear girl, I only tell you because you must grow and take responsibility for your life. Let this be our gift to each other–bad happens, we lose and we win but through it all God grants a chance at human connection that make the bad bearable and the good a humbling experience; not all take advantage or cherish endings.”
We never spoke of again of rape or murder.
