Helen Zuman - Mating in Captivity - A Memoir

When your prosecutor doubles as judge, you have two choices: step into her sentence, or step out of the court and the story that supports it. The story, for all its rude twists, was growing only more fascinating. So I took the feeling “hate” and the group “men” and sought examples in my past of having joined them.

I didn’t have to look far. I’d written my college application essay about why I hated my father and was glad my mother had divorced him. In high school—after being sexually assaulted in a New York City subway station by a man claiming to have a gun—I’d composed a sequel to Sophocles’ Antigone in which Antigone’s sister, Ismene, avenges her by storming Thebes with an army of Amazon warriors and putting Creon to death.

Also, I had an interest in serving Cayta’s sentence. Like Zeta’s disclosure of how dating worked, it hinted that I could act in search of lasting love. What kind of “work” on myself was she prescribing?

“You should do some writing,” she said. “Start with your dad, your relationship with him. What went wrong there? Then your high school boyfriend, any other guys you liked. Write about how you are with guys now, how you treat them, how you act when you’re around them. Write about sex—how you think it’ll be, what good sex might feel like.” She paused, pressing her palms into her knees for emphasis. “You have to get down to what your philosophy is, what you believe about men. Then you can get somewhere. Then you can change.”

Listening to Cayta, I felt my past come alive, like pond scum under a microscope. What creatures—patterns, clues—pulsed within that seeming calm?

“Oh, and there’s something else you might wanna write about with all that,” she said.

“Yeah? What?”

“Psychic cause and effect.”

I wrinkled my eyebrows. I’d skimmed over the term in the Zendik magazine without grasping its meaning.

Cayta pulled her braid over her shoulder and coiled its tip around her finger. “You know how Wulf says, ‘You attract to yourself what you are’?”

I nodded. Though I couldn’t place them, the words seemed familiar.

“That means you’re always broadcasting your true desires out into the universe. Maybe you’re unaware of what you want or why you want it. But you can bet that whatever you get is your cosmic pizza; it’s exactly what you ordered.”

I nodded again. I’d encountered similar ideas in Neale Donald Walsch’s new age blockbuster, Conversations with God . According to Walsch—according to God?—the course of each human life is set by her soul’s choices about what to experience during this round on Earth. Why would a soul ever choose pain, poverty, hate, violence over pleasure, wealth, love, peace? Because, said Walsch/God, souls have all the time in the world to explore the full range of human action and emotion, in quest of ever greater understanding.

Cayta continued, “That’s the law of psychic cause and effect. That’s how the universe works. So when you write out what you’ve been through with men, make sure you look at how you drew that stuff to you. Why you wanted it.”

I didn’t see any harm in flirting with this law. Why not give it a whirl on my mental dance floor? If it squeezed my ribs, I’d let it go. But what if it held true? What if I’d just been initiated into a revolutionary explanation—known only to an elite few—for why things happen as they do ?

Later that night, hunched over my journal in my bunk, I went hunting for what had made me hate men. First I tagged my father’s surly isolationism; my mother’s fury with him; Frank’s rejection; my perception of men as live grenades, to be approached with caution lest I provoke an explosion. Then I slowed to stalk the big game: the three sexual assaults I’d suffered as a fourteen-year-old commuting by subway to and from high school. Though I’d told this story before, I’d yet to write it down. Maybe, like Kro, I hoped to subdue a still-thrashing monster by fixing its details in print.

The first time: I was clutching a pole on a jam-packed downtown 6 train, shoulders aching under the straps of my knapsack. The doors closed at Fifty-Ninth Street. The thunder of steel rail against iron underbelly drowned out any warning rustle as the man to my rear crushed against me and snaked his fingers under my skirt. I stiffened. I didn’t snarl. I didn’t whirl on him, livid, and demand, “Just what the fuck do you think you’re doing, asshole?” (I didn’t utter the word “fuck” till I turned eighteen and my uncle urged me to try it. “You shouldn’t be scared of a word ,” he said.) I thought, If I move, someone will see . His fingers slithered closer to my vagina. I held my breath. The longer the moment stretched, the more trapped I felt by that first beat of what seemed like acquiescence. If I move, someone will see.

As the train pulled into Fifty-First Street—my stop—the pack shifted. A gap opened. Someone saw. An older woman in a bulky, calf-length coat pounced on me with her gaze. “Don’t let him rub up on you like that!” she said. I slunk through the doors to the piss-stained platform.

The second time: I was ascending an escalator between the downtown 6 stop at Fifty-First Street and the Brooklyn-bound F platform at Fifty-Third Street/Lexington Avenue. I felt the snap of leather against my calf. I kept my eyes fixed on the top step. The snap came again, with more sting. I glanced over my shoulder. A pockmarked boy a couple steps down was clutching something—a belt?—close to his thigh. I looked ahead again. A third snap. Then—the breached kilt, the slithering hand. The instinctive paralysis. A thought: Should I kick him? No, that’s unchristian. Turn the other cheek.

At the crest of the escalator, the boy withdrew and walked off, smirking at the two boys traveling with him. They smirked back. Maybe he’d groped me on a dare.

The third time: I’d started taking the Q to the Upper East Side, to avoid both the 6 train and the Fifty-First/Fifty-Third Street transfer. The station at Sixty-Third and Lexington is one of the deepest in the New York City subway system. From the Queens-bound platform, you must climb one hundred vertical feet to reach sunlight.

I knew about boarding the train at the right spot. I knew that if I rode at the Q’s head, it would disgorge me a few steps from the zigzag of stairs and escalators rising to street level. But that morning, dashing to a waiting Q from an arriving F, I’d wound up at the train’s tail.

I was alone when I gained the vast landing at the top of the first stair.

Alone except for a man in a dark coat—padded, large pockets. A coat for shoplifting groceries or curling up on a cardboard sheet in a dark doorway. Above the collar: ratty dreadlocks, scruffy beard, bloodshot eyes. Below the hem: fraying cuffs over rotting loafers, shuffling toward me on grime-shadowed tile.

The man, forcing me to the wall with his fierce grip and thick stench. A front-pocket bulge, likely a poking finger but enough to still me when he said, “I have a gun. Don’t move and don’t scream, or I’ll shoot you.” Then: Hand up my skirt. Tongue prying my lips. Gust of old breath. Tongue on my tongue. Fingers in my underpants, up my vagina. A reaction harking back to every bare-bottom spanking I’d ever received over my father’s knee: I peed. Piss wet my underpants and thighs, trickled down my socks to my shoes. Resistance? Or just terror, turned loose?

Then—shift. A fist broke in. A fist with a ring on it. A ring set with a large, hard stone. Fist, ring, stone. The man’s head jerked to the side. He stumbled back. He flung a handful of change at me and fled down the steps to the train. The coins clattered to the floor.