During orientation week of my freshman year at Pitt – which was, in general, a haze of pastel pamphlets and earnest ice-breakers – the College of Arts & Sciences’ future Class of 2013 was herded up Cardiac Hill into the Petersen Events Center for some family bonding. (There was a lot of piling into arenas and cheering, that first week. At one assembly we sang the theme song to “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” while a representative of the administration slowly put on a cardigan and sneakers. Your alma mater could never.)
Before our A&S rally could get underway in the basketball court, there were a few kinks to work out. Aren’t there always? Above, the Jumbotron scrolled through fun facts and pictures of famous alumni to keep all 3,600 of us entertained. The only tidbit I remember now was the one that seemed most out of place: women are worse at spatial reasoning than men, but playing eight or more hours of video games can begin to close the gap. [Citation needed.]
I did not yet call myself a feminist, but I still found this hilariously tone-deaf. My high school graduation present to myself had been a Wii, and already some new friends from the dorm and I had duked it out over Mario Kart. I won a lot of the time; I’d spent most of the summer practicing. Did this mean I was ahead of the curve? At which point would I fully attain Man Vision?
But now, nearly a decade later, I find the diagnosis more ridiculous than its proposed cure. Worse at spatial reasoning, honestly. Worse how? I always know where my body is in relation to the bodies of men. I always solve for x, where x is the possibility of having to escape. That kind of geometry is my native language. That kind of geometry saves and destroys you.
This is the only thing I remember about that assembly now. Welcome, class of 2013.
***
The last week or so I’ve felt like my heart is being clenched in somebody’s hand. It took a while to identify the sensation as panic. For days, I thought I might be dying. I made it into a joke, the way I make all my private fears into jokes. Whenever I breathed, I felt that fist in my chest flexing and closing. If my heart had knuckles, they’d be white. If my heart had knuckles, maybe I’d throw a punch once in a while.
***
I don’t want to write a sexual assault essay.
I don’t want to write a Sexual Assault Essay™.
I don’t want to make a painful episode of my life into a story with a moral and a poignant closing line, though what else is there to make of it?
I don’t want to detail some grand epiphany, because there has been no epiphany, and I don’t want to let all of my pain out, because my pain has not been useful thus far, and I don’t even want to say that I’m angry, because my anger is a secret I am keeping from everyone, including myself.
***
This morning I made a list of websites to avoid from 10 am until whenever. Can a hearing like this ever really end? Aren’t we still arguing over Anita Hill? Aren’t we still deciding if Leda kissed the swan back?
No Twitter. No Facebook. No news sites. No comments, ever. No emails from political causes I donated to one night while sleepless and heartsick and trying my best to figure out how quickly interest accumulates on the past. Very quickly, I’ve decided; so quickly I don’t think I’ll ever touch the principal now.
Most of all, I am avoiding any place where I might see the men who have spent the last few weeks so earnestly trying to argue that the real victim here is not the woman testifying. I am avoiding seeing the woman testifying. Not because I don’t want to hear what she has to say, but because I already know.
***
Solve for x, where x is the possibility of having to escape, when you are in a moving vehicle driven by a stranger.
Solve for x, where x is the possibility of having to escape, when you are in a moving vehicle driven by a friend.
Solve for x, where x is the possibility of having to escape, when you are in an unfamiliar room.
Solve for x, where x is the possibility of having to escape, when you are in your own room.
***
Before I moved into the dorm for orientation week of my freshman year at Pitt, I got an email telling me to complete an online module called Alcohol-Wise. If you’d paid attention at all during high school health class, it was a breeze – I think I finished in twenty minutes. Maybe it helped that I’d never been to a party in high school. Maybe it helped that none of my friends went to high school parties either. There was nothing to get defensive about, just a lot of math problems. One beer equals how much wine? When is a mixed drink fully metabolized by the body?
Essay: which drugs can be slipped into a drink, and what are their effects on the body? How can you avoid having a drug slipped into your drink? What are your safety strategies? Do you know the number of the campus police?
Bonus question, unassigned: how can you avoid slipping a drug into someone’s drink? What are your accountability strategies? Do you know how to face what you have done?
***
What’s funny is that it doesn’t actually matter what is done to you if you’re sufficiently afraid. For some reason elected officials never understand that. As if the only thing you have to lose is your honor. As if your autonomy does not enter the equation.
What’s funny is that nothing happened. What’s funny is that “nothing” happened. What’s funny is that nothing “happened.”
What’s funny is that, later in college, the friend who kissed me when I did not want to be kissed and held me when I did not want to be held was someone I’d played Mario Kart with many times. So hypothetically we should have been on similar levels, in terms of spatial reasoning, and yet no matter how many times I ran the numbers he was still so, so close.
What’s funny is that I was sober and he was drunk. Come on, that’s funny. That’s actually kind of hilarious.
***
Yesterday I walked to the New York Public Library on my break and sat at the base of a statue outside until a strange man came up and started talking to me, and so I went into the building and sat on a smooth marble bench until a strange man came up and started talking to me, and I feel so guilty for looking at men like I am a deer and they are headlights, but surely they’re used to it by now.
The second man just wanted to know if the library had wifi. I told him it did and showed him how to log on, and then he told me about how he and his wife had come all the way from Australia to see the city. Where was I from? Did I want to see some pictures of kangaroos? And I did, actually. And they really were pictures of kangaroos, not of anything else. We have so much to be grateful for.
***
A few days ago I went to therapy and held forth, as I have done many times and will presumably do many more times, on how much I hate the idea that everything happens for a reason. For one thing, I’m Orthodox, and we’re all about the irreducible mystery of faith, not about God-as-parlor-magician. For another thing, I resent the idea that suffering is necessary. I would not be diminished if I had, at a few key moments of my life, been luckier.
What I think is that things happen. And you try, for the rest of your life, to make something useful from them. Not the reason why they happened but the way you mean to carry on.
Solve for x, where x is the distance between our bodies.
Solve for x, where x is the circumference of my heart.
Solve for x, where x is the amount of time this is going to take.
Please share your answers. I really need to know.
