Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls(25)

My father turned to Gretchen. “Is anything coming back to you?”

“Dad, please.”

Sensing something strange was happening, the young man stepped away from the car and continued down the street. “Hey,” my father called. “Hey, you!”

The next black man he stopped had a beat-up cast on his arm, and the one after that had an African accent and scars like whiskers on his face. Then Gretchen asked to be taken back to her apartment. She was waitressing that night, and my father insisted on driving her to work. Getting her home, he let me know, was my responsibility. “I still can’t believe you let her wander around by herself at three o’clock in the morning.”





One thing the adults all seemed to agree on was that Gretchen was remiss in walking to the grocery store. So remiss, according to some, that you couldn’t really blame the guy who attacked her, as what was he supposed to think, a young woman out on her own at that hour—a young woman in shorts, no less?

“But doesn’t the killing jar count for anything?” I argued. “Is it that hard to distinguish a prostitute from a college student? Whores don’t wear glasses. And what about me? I walk to the store all the time.”

The rules, of course, were different for women. When they were young, each of my sisters was approached by a stranger, someone in a car who’d pretend to be lost and needing directions. The girls would come up to the rolled-down window and see that the driver’s pants were unzipped, that his penis was hard, and that he was stroking it. It wasn’t the same guy every time—one might be bald and wearing sunglasses, while another could have long sideburns and a lazy eye—but it happened in turn to all the Sedaris girls. They’d see a man their father’s age masturbating, and afterward they’d wander into the house, never hysterical but slightly dazed, as if they’d been stopped by a talking cat.

I felt left out and remember asking my father why it never happened to me.

“Well, think about it,” he said. “Exposing yourself to a girl is one thing. Doing it to a boy, though—the guy would have to be perverted.”

Then there were the strangers who called the house. “You want to eat my what?” I once heard my mother say into the receiver. “Buddy, if that’s what you’re after, you are talking to the wrong lady.” Then she laughed, not cruelly but in a way that seemed genuine. Had she said, “Here, let me put my daughter on the phone,” it wouldn’t have surprised me.

There’d been something almost comic about the exhibitionists and crank callers, the sense that, more than anything, these men were to be pitied. Touching, though, that was something else. Then there was the racial divide. I don’t mean to suggest that my father was operating on a double standard—he’d have gone out looking for a white would-be rapist as well. I just don’t think he’d have felt so frustrated and out of his element.





The day after poring over mug shots, Gretchen had a class. I worked at the restaurant and came home to find my dad sitting on my front porch. It seemed that, with my sister or without her, he was determined to find the man who’d attacked her. It was beyond ridiculous at this point, but I think he knew that. Someone you love is assaulted by a stranger, and you can either sit at home and do nothing or drive around with an iced vodka and water tinkling between your legs, not just looking at other men but really looking at them, studying them, the way the students in the drawing class studied me. “Well, that’s something new,” my father said at one point, gesturing to a guy with a shower cap on his head.

It was rare for my dad and me to spend time alone, rarer still to be on the same team, and with a bat, no less. We both wanted to protect Gretchen, though neither of us was ultimately able to. After getting accepted to RISD, she moved to Providence and even learned to drive. She was in her car one night and had just pulled up in front of her apartment when a man yanked open the passenger door and jumped in beside her. “He was white,” she reported, “wearing jeans and a red plaid jacket.” Luckily she scared him off by laying on her horn. A few months later, following a long shift at the restaurant she worked at, she fell asleep and awoke to find three men standing around her bed. This was a case of her needing protection from herself, as it turned out they were firefighters. It seemed she’d gone to bed with a pan of popcorn on the stove and had slept through the kitchen full of smoke, the phone calls from her neighbors, and the concerted pounding on her door.

All that was in the future on the afternoon my father and I cruised around Raleigh, looking for potential rapists. For a while the two of us talked about Gretchen, imagining the worst that might have happened and stoking our anger. Then we talked about all my sisters and how much they needed us, or at least him. I was disappointed when my dad’s drink ran out and he headed back to drop me off at my apartment. I somehow hadn’t realized until that moment how much I dreaded the place, how freighted it was with the sense of failure. It seemed that I’d missed some pivotal step on the path to adulthood. My father went from high school to the navy to college to IBM, skipping from one to the next like they were stones in a river he was crossing. These wouldn’t have been my choices, surely, but you had to admire his single-mindedness. When I thought of my path, I recalled several quaaludes I’d taken a week earlier, pills that had somehow caused me to fall up the flight of stairs from my apartment to Gretchen’s. Was this what the rest of my life would be like? I wanted to say to my father, “Help me,” but what came out was “Do you think you could maybe loan me twenty dollars?”