Rebecca Coleman - Inside These Walls

But before I worked up the nerve to ask, there was another evening alone in the house with Clinton and again he ordered me to go to bed. This time, though, when he climbed into my bed, I elbowed him away, hard. He snapped at me, and with a level of courage I didn’t know I had, I turned around— for the first time admitting I wasn’t sleeping through all of this—and told him to get out and leave me alone.

I should never have done that. It made him angry, and he shoved down my arms and rolled onto me, planting his forearm across my neck. He already had his pants down, and although I was struggling against him, I couldn’t scream. Eventually I stopped struggling, because I was beginning to black out due to lack of oxygen. Clinton started telling me I was a good girl, a good girl, as he completed the rape. It was a terrible, burning pain, and I was certain that he was tearing me apart, but by the next morning—regrettably, perhaps—there was no physical sign of what had occurred. He was always careful to ejaculate outside my body, and on later occasions usually came prepared with condoms. I wish I could see this as a mercy, that I was fortunate not to have become pregnant. But later, when he grew more worried that I would report him, he sometimes warned me that if I tried to accuse him there was no evidence to prove it. And I believed him.

After that first incident I grew afraid to ask my mother for a lock on my door, because what had happened was so horrible that I was frightened of saying anything that might raise her suspicions. She was very protective of me, and I knew she would be devastated that, in this most egregious way, she had failed. I was also very concerned that she would think less of me if she knew I was no longer a virgin, because she was religious and it was something she had discussed with me many times in the few years prior. I rationalized that it couldn’t be undone, and so all I could do was try to contain the damage by not making it my mother’s calamity, as well.

Since I could no longer pretend to be asleep, and Clinton was now escalating his behavior with me, I tried out a different technique. When I was very young I used to love a television program called My Living Doll, about a man who is given custody of a female android, named Rhoda, originally designed for the Air Force. She is utterly naive to human society, and must be taught how to display normal emotions. When Clinton came in I took to imagining I was a Rhoda-like machine, able to endure this because I was unaware that it was wrong, feeling empty of any emotion about it. Usually I would pretend that I had been shut off entirely, but when he forced me to do specific things—grabbing me by the back of my head, for example—I imagined that this was a mode, or a function I was performing, the way a washing machine can be switched to rinse or spin.

However, as the abuse went on, I began for the first time to confess it to my priest. I didn’t merely confess to “sexual immorality” or “sins against the Sixth Commandment”—I was quite specific about what Clinton was doing, and I used his name. I was actively hoping Father George would intervene. In school they had taught us that nothing could break the Seal of Confession, even if a person confessed to a terrible crime, but I still thought what I told him would have an effect. Clinton still went to church with us, but not to confession, so obviously the priest would have to start denying him the Eucharist, which would have certainly gotten my mother and Garrison’s attention. Or perhaps Father George would go to Garrison and say, “You need to talk to your son,” without breaking my confidence. But each week he assigned me three Our Fathers in penance and forgave my sins, and that was the beginning and end of it. Clinton continued to take Communion, and my mother and Garrison remained oblivious.

In the fall Clinton started college, and a sort of ebb and flow began with this whole situation. He would stop it sometimes for months, just long enough to make me believe he had outgrown it, and then start up again. I grew taller and stronger, but also more resigned, and—this is difficult to express in a way that makes sense to an outsider—it became a kind of normal. A human being is designed to get used to nearly anything. One afternoon, as I tried to lie very still and pretend I was shut off and that my body had no inhabitant, I felt strangely lightheaded and then, all at once, I was fully inside my body; it was as though a front door had blown open in a raging blizzard and the tempest rushed in, impossible to ignore or constrain. I cried out, and Clinton knew what that meant. I remember the look in Clinton’s eyes afterward, like a man who has just beaten the house at blackjack. I was a Catholic school girl, extremely sheltered from the worldly influences of society; I knew absolutely nothing about female sexual response, and I didn’t understand what had happened or where it had come from. I only knew that it was the profoundest shame of all, to have felt so good from something so filthy. From that point forward, though it went unspoken, he and I both knew I would never expose him for what he had done. No matter how I hated it and always would, I believed it was damning evidence against me that, every now and then, my nervous system would crash like a malfunctioning computer and produce a response that most people seek on purpose.

The final time Clinton approached me he was already dating Susie, the woman he would soon marry. I was seventeen and headed to college myself soon. He had left me alone for a couple of months, although by now I was wiser than to think that meant it was over. A year before, I had installed a hook and eye on my bedroom door, and I kept closer track of my mother’s church schedule. That had slowed him down a bit. But he had taken it as a challenge, and so his assaults were less frequent yet much bolder and more aggressive when they occurred. Risks he never would have considered before were now fair game, and he was rough and punitive when he managed to pin me down. After so many years of my listless cooperation, he now felt I had become difficult about something that was his right.

And so that last afternoon, when I heard him coming down the stairs while I was doing laundry, I thought about the fact that the house was empty, and I felt afraid. In the basement window my mother kept all sorts of pretty glass bottles she had collected from flea markets and vacations to Mexico. I grabbed a green ginger ale bottle in my right hand while shifting the laundry to the dryer with my left. When Clinton touched my hip I spun around and hit him on the side of the head with the bottle, which broke on impact and cut a deep gash across his scalp. He had to call an ambulance and tell them it had happened while he was working on his car, while I swept up the glass and rearranged the bottles in the window to hide the empty spot. But he never touched me again. And the most pathetic part was I was more concerned about Susie at that point than about myself. Susie was a nice girl, and I didn’t want any part in Clinton being sleazy to her.

My celibate life began that day, and continued until a few months after I started dating Ricky almost five years later. Once I began seeing him I was surprised to discover I wanted to be close to him, and I was intrigued rather than panicked by the idea that he wanted me. I didn’t want my experiences with him to be tainted by Clinton’s abuse, and I was afraid he would think I was dirty and undesirable, so for a while I said nothing to him about that. But a secret that dark is impossible to hide. If you have never tried to nurture a normal adult relationship when you only associate sexual pleasure with violence followed by sickening guilt, you’ll have to take my word for it that it’s not easy. Yet Ricky was patient and understanding. He grasped that it would take work to reshuffle my associations and avoid my panic triggers. He always kept things bright and playful, and he was very loving.