Dana Spiotta - Eat the Document

She stopped first in a small farming town in Pennsylvania. She lasted only a week at a rooming house. She stayed in bed for three days straight. The sheets were clean and pressed, but they scratched her skin and had an undersmell of detergent and mold. They seemed to hold dampness deep within them, and she couldn’t rest. She couldn’t find a job. She quickly approached broke. She even ate dinner at the church soup kitchen.

She forced herself back on the road, again hitching. Anywhere west. She thought she could work somewhere for a couple of weeks and get enough money for a bus to L.A.

She stuck to the highway and walked in the direction she was headed as she hitched. She had a system. She refused any rides with two men, or with men in pickups, or with men with pinwheel, Benzedrine eyes. It was getting dark, and she decided to accept a ride from a man in a beige Pontiac Le Mans. This seemed a good bet — he had a woman with him. Caroline sat in the back, and the three of them traveled in silence for many miles. She noted, discreetly, that the woman was far too young, really, to be his wife. But she also noted the man’s clean, conservatively cut clothes. His pressed, collared shirt. His short, combed-back hair. She trusted getting a ride from a semi-establishment type. A regular middle-class guy who obeyed the law. The young girl, however, was not dressed neatly. She wore cutoff, tight, faded jeans. She sat with her feet up on the dashboard. The soles of her bare feet were black with dirt. She looked younger than Caroline. The girl wiggled in her seat and didn’t speak. After a while, she took out rolling papers and began to deftly roll a joint. She wound it in her fingers and neatly licked it down. She pulled out the car lighter and lit up, all of which surprised Caroline. Then the girl passed it to him, and they shared the smoke. They didn’t offer it to Caroline at first, then the girl gestured the joint toward her as she inhaled. Caroline shook her head no and looked out the window. There was a menace to the offer, a sort of chaos to the exchange, when the license of drugs was divorced from any familiar context. The joint had been appropriated by anyone, or by the mainstream, for baser, meaner purpose. Appropriated as another way to get fucked up and do what you want. Not liberation but mere licentiousness. Why not? Was there anything inherently groovy in a drug?

They continued for a few miles in silence. Caroline considered the possibility that she should escape, but then she shrugged it off. Everyone gave off freaky vibes toward her, she just needed to stay calm. She sat and waited until the man turned the car off the road to the shrub-concealed shoulder. He got out of the front seat, and the girl edged over to the driver’s seat. All of this happened quickly and with no words uttered. The area was deserted, and before Caroline got herself together to run for the bushes and take her chances in the middle of nowhere, the girl pulled out into the road and the man with the short, neatly combed hair sat in the back with her. Caroline saw the girl glance in the rearview mirror at them: the slightly bored, lascivious look finally sent Caroline’s adrenaline into her chest and limbs. The girl smirked a bit at Caroline’s eye contact and hit the gas as the man reached for her in the backseat. Caroline pushed him away, but he just pushed her down on the seat. He was not smirking but serious as he pulled her T-shirt up and held it. She shrieked, and he covered her mouth with his forearm. He used his other hand to pin both her arms over her head and held both her wrists tightly with his hand. He didn’t say a word, in fact he had a vacant calm about him. He took his other arm away from her mouth and moved it down to his pants. Caroline didn’t scream but took advantage of the moment to push herself hard to get out from under his body. He brought the back of his hand up fast in a smack under her chin, jarring her head and neck. Her jaw felt fragile under the blow. She stopped moving. She watched him reach his hand down below his waist, his maneuvering and hitching out. She could taste her own blood where her teeth had hit her tongue. She felt him yank the elastic top of her skirt down and then pull it up. Her underwear was maybe ripped off or pushed aside. She couldn’t tell. She didn’t struggle and lay there at a distance from the moment; it happened, and she was as absent as she could be. She did think about not wanting to be beaten or killed. And would not think of him thrusting at her or feel him inside her. She could will that. She did think for a moment of the girl watching in the rearview mirror, and it made her gasp. Then she regained herself and willed herself immobile and totally withdrawn. It worked. It ended quickly after all. And in his disgust at the end, he pulled away from her with a shove but did not hurt her further. The girl pulled over, and they left her by the side of the road. The whole incident took less than fifteen minutes.

Almost instantly her feeling came back. She felt as achy as if she had been run over. She straightened out her clothes. Bruises would soon appear. Then she felt — and this was truly the worst of it — his mess ooze out of her, into what remained of her underpants. She pushed with her muscles until she got it all out of her, then pulled her panties off, under her skirt, by the side of the road. She wiped herself as efficiently and discreetly as possible with the damp cotton. She felt a deep humiliation holding her underwear in her hand and not knowing what to do next. She shrugged her shoulder up and pushed her face against her short sleeve to wipe the tears out of her hot eyes. She discarded the soiled underpants by the side of the road. She no longer had her rucksack of clothes and few belongings. That was still in the car with them. She had thirty dollars in one of her shoes and that was it.

She sat for a while on a rock at the edge of the road. She stopped crying. Then she thought: It never happened . She would never speak of it, or let herself think of it, ever. She was quite certain that you could change your past, change the facts, by will alone. Only memory makes it real. So eliminate the memory. And if it was also true that there were occasions when she couldn’t control where her mind went — a dream, a cold sweat at an unexpected moment, an odor that would suddenly betray her — time would improve it. Time lessens everything — the good things you desperately want to remember, and the awful things you need to forget. Eventually all will be equally faint. This was one thing her second life had taught her about how humans endure.

It was at this point — and not later, when the meeting with Bobby at their agreed-upon rendezvous point didn’t happen — that she began to inhabit her new life as her only life.

SHE MADE IT to a friendly, unhip, stranded desert town just over the border from Arizona. Nova, California, population three thousand. It was, despite the best efforts of fifty years of laissez-faire development, a pretty town. It sat on a mesa and looked at desert and mountains. She rented a room with a name she made up on the spot. She spent her last few dollars on hair dye — light brown to match her roots. Leaning close to the mirror, she put on several coats of mascara and some pink lipstick. She patted concealer over the bruise on her chin and finished with face powder that looked a shade too pale. She pulled her newly dyed hair up and piled it on the crown of her head. Then she pinned a wide headband in front of the piled hair.

She landed a waitress job in a diner the very first afternoon she looked. She felt a surge of confidence and safety. The counterculture didn’t exist here. She could have her own hair color and she could have a “public” job. In the vast expanse of this country, who was she to stand out?