My Dark Vanessa(78)
Janine exhales a rush of breath against my ear. “Vanessa, I really hope you do. We owe it to each other to do whatever we can. We’re all in this together.”
I glare across the lobby and force myself to agree. “Sure, absolutely, you’re so right.”
“Trust me, I know how hard this is.” Janine lowers her voice. “I’m a survivor, too.”
That word, with its cloying empathy; that patronizing, flattening word that makes my whole body cringe no matter the context—it pushes too far. My lips curl up over my teeth as I spit out, “You don’t know anything about me,” and I hang up the phone, bolt across the lobby to the empty staff bathroom, and throw up into a toilet, curling my arms around the bowl until the wave passes, my stomach empties out, and I’m coughing up bile.
I’m still catching my breath on the floor and checking my blazer for vomit when the bathroom door opens and I hear my name. Inez.
“Vanessa? Are you ok?”
I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. “Yup, I’m fine,” I say. “Just a stomach thing.”
The door closes, then opens again.
“Are you sure?” she asks.
“I’m fine.”
“Because I could cover for—”
“Would you just give me some fucking space?” I press my cheek against the metal stall as her footsteps hurry away, back to the desk where, for the rest of the shift, her glassy eyes threaten to cry.
A few years ago, I saw Taylor’s face staring at me from a light pole while I waited to cross Congress Street. It was a flyer, an advertisement for a poetry reading at a bar. I knew she wrote poems and published some. I read everything I could get my hands on, ordering copies of the journals, routinely checking her seldom-updated website. I looked for traces of Strane in her writing, but all I found in the poems were quiet images of luna moths in incandescent light, a six-stanza meditation on her uterus. It’s something I could never wrap my head around, the idea that she could go through life writing about anything other than Strane if what he did to her was really so bad.
I’ve never understood anything about her, no matter how hard I try. A few years ago I figured out where she worked, the neighborhood she lived in. Based on an Instagram of the view from her kitchen window, I figured out her exact building. I never stalked her, not exactly; the closest I ever let myself get was walking by her work, passing the building around lunchtime, checking each coming and going blond head. But when wasn’t I checking for her, scanning faces in restaurants and coffee shops, supermarkets and corner stores? I imagined her sometimes behind me as I walked the city. The thought of her watching made my body buzz, the same feeling I’d get when I imagined Strane’s eyes on me.
When I went to her reading, I stood at the back of the dimly lit bar, my red hair tucked up and hidden under a beanie. I stayed only long enough to see her walk to the microphone and start to speak. Her great big grin and wild, gesticulating hands. She was fine—that’s what I told myself as I walked home, my cheeks flushed with something between jealousy and relief. She looked ordinary, happy, untouched. That night, I dug through old folders, found marked-up college essays, poems from high school. A paper I wrote on the role of rape in Titus Andronicus with Henry Plough’s comments at the end: Vanessa, your writing is astounding. I remember scoffing at the grade, knowing it was nothing to take seriously, only another round of praise from a teacher who wanted to coax me closer. But maybe he meant it. And maybe Strane—with all his compliments, his insistence that the way I saw the world was extraordinary—meant it, too. For all his faults, he was a good teacher, trained in spotting potential.
I search Twitter for Strane’s name and mostly find Taylor’s, a mix of feminist defenses and sexist attacks. One tweet includes a photo of her at fourteen, skinny and smiling through braces in her field hockey uniform, the text screaming, THIS IS HOW OLD TAYLOR BIRCH WAS WHEN JACOB STRANE ASSAULTED HER. I try to imagine the same line paired with the Polaroids Strane took of me at fifteen, my heavy-lidded eyes and swollen lips, or with the photos I took of myself at seventeen, standing before a backdrop of birch trees, lifting my skirt as I stared at the camera, looking like a Lolita and knowing exactly what I wanted, what I was. I wonder how much victimhood they’d be willing to grant a girl like me.
2002
Senior year starts, and within the first week, I show up at the counselor’s office with my college applications filled out and a draft of an entrance essay I worked on all summer. I kept the list of schools Strane wrote for me, but the guidance counselor has me expand the list. I need safeties, she says. Why don’t we take a look at some state schools?
The strip mall diner closed over the summer, so I eat in the cafeteria, sitting with Wendy and Maria, girls from my English class. Maria is on exchange from Chile and lives with Wendy’s family. They’re exactly the kind of girls my parents want me to be friends with—studious, sweet, no boyfriends. At lunch, we eat low-fat yogurt and apple slices with two measured tablespoons of peanut butter while we quiz each other with flash cards, compare homework, and obsess over college applications. Wendy is hoping for University of Vermont, and Maria wants to stay in the States for college, too. Her dream is anywhere in Boston.
Life goes on and on. I get my license but no car. Babe comes home with porcupine quills all over her muzzle, and Mom and I have to hold her down while Dad pulls out each one with needle-nose pliers. Dad is elected union rep at the hospital. Mom gets an A in her history class at the community college. The leaves change. I get decent SAT scores and finish another draft of my college application essay. In English, there’s a lesson on Robert Frost, but the teacher makes no mention of sex. Maria and Wendy share a bagel at lunch, tearing pieces off with their fingers. A boy in my physics class asks me to the water semiformal and I say yes out of curiosity, but he has oniony breath and the thought of him touching me makes me want to die. In the dark auditorium, when the boy leans in to kiss me during a slow dance, I blurt out that I have a boyfriend.