2002-11-27 - 11:16 p.m.
My day began with a good-bye. Skootie was setting out on her long drive to Indiana right after I left for work. Her bags were all packed, CDs picked out, snacks ready. I think it is good for her to go and reconnect with her family. And I know she is a good driver, has a new car, has AAA, no bad weather is expected, etc. In other words, I have every reason to believe everything will go just fine. But some little part of me still just wants to burst into tears when it is time to say good-bye. But I didn't. My voice was a little shaky, though. She called a little while ago to let me know that she made it there okay.
The day before a holiday is always a blow-off day at work. Half of the office was gone and most of the other half managed to make the putting up of Christmas decorations into an all-day event. The only phone call I got all day was from my daughter-in-law, needing some moral support for the horrifying prospect of handling the raw turkey. She is very squeamish about raw poultry.
"Do you cut off that...thing that... hangs down?"
I volunteer to come over and do the gross part, as I have done in years past. But this year she has decided to tackle it.
"If I am ever going to have kids," she explains, "I am going to have to learn to deal with this stuff."
I assured her that she would be earning big Thanksgiving bravery points for this.
So tonight I have pumpkin pies in the oven. And there are a dozen happy things on my want-to-do list. But I was realizing that I still feel a little bit at loose ends, rattling around in the house by myself. And for some reason, I was remembering another night-before-Thanksgiving I spent alone, a long time ago, the nadir of all holiday eves...
A page from my autobiography.....
It was the night before Thanksgiving, my first year in college. And I use the phrase loosely, because by the end of November, I was not really "in" college, having blown off my classes and made a dramatic exit from my parents' house on my eighteenth birthday. Two girls I barely knew had allowed me to move into their huge apartment in the loft space over a store downtown. The "apartment" was really a warren of dingy rooms that had once been rented out as sleeping rooms back in the days before people expected a private bath. Seven bedrooms opened onto a central hall, and one suite had a kitchen and living room. A single bathroom with claw foot tub that would have been shared by all the "roomers" was at the end of the dark hallway. It was a great place for parties, because there was no one around at night to mind that we blasted music at all hours. A revolving cast of friends, acquaintances and strangers made themselves at home, listening to music, smoking, drinking and crashing in our many bedrooms.
Except on the night before Thanksgiving. School was out and all the student-types were on their way home or somewhere more interesting. The small college town was dead. My two official roommates had left early for the four-hour drive back to their hometown. And so I found myself alone in the cavernous apartment. I had reluctantly agreed to attend a family Thanksgiving dinner at my aunt and uncle's house, but since they lived nearby, I was not planning to leave any earlier than necessary. So I sat that evening in a pool of yellow light, feeling very small, trying to read while hearing every little noise in the big empty building.
Then I hear footsteps in the hall and a knock on the door. It is a guy I recognized from parties and hanging out in the student union. He was friends with people I knew, but the only thing I knew about him was that he was older, twenty-six or twenty-seven, and a Vietnam vet, which gave him a certain mystique. He has shaggy blond hair and the beginnings of a beard. He pulls a bottle of Jack Daniels, still in the paper bag, from the pocket of his army coat and says that he is looking for somebody to drink with. Even though I am not much of a drinker, I am grateful enough for the company and invite him in. We pour drinks and start talking. He seems interested in my art work, and I get out a portfolio and spread drawings on the floor. He is nicer and easier to talk to than I remembered, and I am actually kind of flattered at the attention of this older and more worldly man.
Even though I'm not interested in him in that way, after our long conversation, I don't protest when he tries to kiss me. And a short time later, when he claims to be too drunk to drive home, I tell him he can stay there for the night. That didn't seem at all unusual to me since crashing at someone else's pad was a normal part of the college party routine. I should have protested more when he pulled me down on the bed after I directed him to a room where he could stay. I was still naive enough to think there was no great harm in a little making out. But this was no callow high school boy, and things quickly started getting out of hand. And suddenly he was not so drunk and not so nice. He started pulling my clothes off. I resisted.
"You are not going to tease me all night and then say no!" he said angrily and started to force himself on me in earnest.
I am instantly in total panic. OH MY GOD. I am about to be raped.
I will never quite understand how I did what I did next: I threw this man off of me and onto the floor and broke his arm. I must have caught him completely off guard, because it wasn't sheer strength; I am small and he was a fairly big guy. I didn't actually know his arm was broken until I saw him the next week in a cast. But I knew that I had saved myself. He began to curse and howl in pain, and he jumped up, grabbing his jacket and half-empty bottle, and disappeared into the cold night.
I was quite shaken up, and knew I would not be able to sleep for a while, so I wandered down the hall to the living room to have a smoke.
It was no more than a few minutes later that I heard a popping noise in the kitchen. Looking up, I saw flames shooting up from the trash can and the plastic curtains hanging right above it had just caught fire. The blaze was eating up the curtains all the way to the ten-foot ceiling. I ran to the sink and grabbed a dirty spaghetti pot full of water, and threw it at the fire. I kept running back and forth, wildly throwing pot after pot of water at the flaming curtains. And finally miraculously, the blaze fizzled and went out. Luckily the old building had metal ceilings, and the fire didn't have time to catch anything else after burning up the curtains.
I remember standing there, just staring at the terrible mess for a long time, hardly able to believe I had just put out a fire. I finally surmised that Mr. Rapist had tried to be helpful by emptying the ashtray into the trashcan before luring me into bed. So not only might I have been raped, I could easily have died in a fire if I had not made it back into the kitchen in time to find it. The place was a firetrap, with high narrow windows, and only one exit.
Then I began slowly to clean up the soot and ash, the greasy spaghetti water, the melted plastic. And by the time I got done it was Thanksgiving morning and I had no further inclination to sleep. So I went out and drove around in my car until it was time for dinner with my relatives.
Sometime after the meal, I sat down beside a warm fire and, exhausted from the events of the night before, began to doze off. And I kept my eyes closed and my breathing quiet when I was brought back to consciousness by the voices of my father and uncle standing nearby.
"Whad ya spose is the matter with HER?" my father whispered.
"Must be on DRUGS." my uncle said. He was a self-styled authority on drugs, although I don't imagine he had ever even seen any drugs or anyone under the influence. " They always sleep a lot when they come down off the drugs."
I don't remember my father's exact words, but he probably said something like: "Well, God damn." Because that was his usual response to anything concerning me.
I pretended to be asleep and let them think what they wanted. I couldn't tell them that I was up all night, that I was nearly raped, that I put out a fire single-handedly. Their response to that would have been anger; or probably fear disguised as anger. Because of course none of that would have happened if I had been a good, predictable girl and lived at home and pretended that my first year of college was just the thirteenth grade. If I had been a good, obedient girl and been there to set the table for supper, and endured my father's criticism of every aspect of my personality, appearance and behavior. But no, I was so desperate to have some kind of a life of my own, that I was willing to run and leap into a void. And like a lot of kids, I didn't know right then what I was running to, I only knew what I was running from.
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