Free Lucky by Alice Sebold Page B

understood the rules of the game, is frightened when the others tell him he is wrong.
    We walked upstairs to my mother's bedroom. I sat him down on the couch and took up a position across from him on my mother's desk chair.
    "I'm not going to attack you, Dad," I said. "I want you to tell me why you don't understand, and I'll try to explain it to you."
    "I don't know why you didn't try to get away," he said.
    "I did."
    "But how could he have raped you unless you let him?"
    "That would be like saying I wanted it to happen."
    "But he didn't have the knife in the tunnel."
    "Dad," I said, "think about this. Wouldn't it be physically impossible to rape and beat me while holding a knife the whole time?"
    He thought for a second and then seemed to agree.
    "So most women who are raped," I said, "even if there was a weapon, when the rape is going on, the weapon is not there in her face. He overpowered me, Dad. He beat me up. I couldn't want something like that, it's impossible."
    When I look back on myself in that room I don't understand how I could have been so patient. All I can think is that his ignorance was inconceivable to me. I was shocked by it but I had a desperate need for him to understand. If he didn't—he who was my father and who clearly wanted to understand—what man would?
    He did not comprehend what I had been through, or how it could have happened without some complicity on my part. His ignorance hurt. It still hurts, but I don't blame him. My father may not have fully understood, but what was most important to me was that I left the room knowing how much it had meant to him that I took him upstairs and tried, as best I could, to answer his questions. I loved him and he loved me and our communication was imperfect. That didn't seem so bad to me. After all, I had been prepared for the news of the rape to destroy everyone in my life. We were living, and, in those first weeks, that was enough.
    Although TV was something I could share with my family while we each remained in our individual islands of pain, it was also problematic.
    I'd always liked Kojak. He was bald and cynical and talked curtly out of the side of his mouth while sucking on a lollipop. But he had a big heart. He also policed a city and had a bumbling sibling he got to kick around. This made him attractive to me.
    So I watched Kojak as I lay in my Lanz nightgown and drank chocolate milk shakes. (At first, I had difficulty with solid food. Initially my mouth was sore from the sodomy and, after this, having food in my mouth reminded me too much of the rapist's penis as it lay against my tongue.)
    Watching Kojak alone was endurable, because even though violent, it was so obviously fictional in this violence (Where was the smell? The blood? Why did all the victims have perfect faces and bodies?). But when my sister or father or mother came in to watch television with me, I grew tense.
    I have memories of my sister sitting in the rocker in front of where I was positioned on the couch. She would always ask me if a given program was all right before turning it on.
    She would be vigilant throughout the hour or two hours it was on. If she worried, I would see her head start to turn around to check on me.
    "I'm okay, Mary," I began saying, able to predict when she might grow concerned.
    It made me angry with her and with my parents. I needed the pretense that inside the house I was still the same person I'd always been. It was ridiculous but essential, and I felt the stares of my family as betrayals, even though intellectually I knew otherwise.
    What took me a bit longer to put together was that those television shows were more upsetting to them than they could ever have been to me. They had no idea, because I had not told them, what had happened to me in that tunnel—what the particulars were. They were fitting together the horrors of imagination and nightmare and trying to fashion what had been their sister's or child's reality. I knew exactly what had