The Quiet Game

She holds up her hand; she means to tell this story no matter what. "So, he unbuckles his belt and takes it out. While he's driving. And it was. I mean, the stories were true. I know this sounds gross-Ray Presley, right? What a creep. But he was only thirty-five or so then. Younger than we are now. So, I took the dare further. I thought I'd drive him a little crazier, to get back at him for all the times he'd ogled me. It was the stupidest thing I ever did. He pulled off Lower Woodville Road, right into the woods. I knew then things were slipping out of control, but I wasn't sure how to get out of it. I figured, you know, just be calm, let him kiss me, touch him enough to get it over with and get out of there. The next thing I knew my dress was around my chest and he was raping me."

"You don't have to tell me this."

She turns to me, her eyes bright with pooled tears. "A little too real for you? I think I passed out the first time. I woke up later and it was happening again, outside the truck. I started screaming, so he stuffed my dress into my mouth. It was like being simultaneously strangled and bludgeoned to death from the inside. When it was over, we got back into the truck, but he wouldn't leave. He was completely freaked out. I think he thought my father was going to kill him, so he just sat there, trying to figure out what to do. He sat there for twenty minutes with me screaming at him, trying to get out and run, going crazy. Then he did it again. I knew then that he was crazy. I mean, three times in an hour, that's just not normal for a thirty-five-year-old man."

The deja vu is almost too powerful to endure. Livy and I once sat in the dark while she told me the story of being raped by a high school football player during a date. Twenty years later, only the context has changed.

"I'm sorry. I had no idea. I couldn't even have imagined that."

"But isn't it such a touching little story?" Her tears are rolling down her cheeks now. "Ray Presley, proud father of my first and only child."

I want to hold her, but I think she would probably hit me if I touched her.

"I couldn't believe I even conceived," she says, wiping her face. "But I did. And you think I should have welcomed Jenny with open arms." She modulates her voice into a hysterical exaggeration of a TV mom: "Hello, sweetheart! Where have you been all my life? Give Mama a hug!"

The delirium in her voice sends chills through me. "Jenny had nothing to do with what Presley did to you that night."

"She is that night to me! Don't you get that? Do you think I could ever look at her without reliving every second of those rapes?"

I shrug and stay silent. I am not a woman. I can't know. "When I told you Presley was coming to kill your father, you said you hoped he would come."

"I'd kill him in a minute," she says in a flat voice. "Like stepping on a cockroach."

"I knew it was something like this. Something dark."

"Dark? The whole thing is so Sally Jessy Raphael it makes me want to vomit."

"You didn't tell your father Presley had raped you?"

A shadow of shame crosses her face. "No. I'd started the whole thing, hadn't I? I suppose I could have lied and said he attacked me out of the blue, but my father is pretty hard to lie to. He's scary that way. He sees dishonesty in people."

"Maybe because he's so dishonest himself."

"Don't, Penn."

"But he knew you were pregnant. Eventually, I mean."

She nods. "My sister told him. She'd gotten pregnant three years before, and Daddy made her get an abortion. It really messed her up. Our great Catholic parents practically forcing her to terminate her pregnancy. You'd think that when I turned up pregnant, she would have done all she could to help me hide it. But she'd felt inferior to me her whole life. I was the special one, the adored one. She just had to tell them that I'd screwed up as badly as she had."

"Livy, why in God's name did you have the baby? Under the circumstances-"

"Under the circumstances, I wasn't thinking rationally, okay? After the rape I was so upset, I went to Radcliffe a week early. Two months later, when I found out for sure I was pregnant, I thought about terminating it. But then my sister blabbed, and the next thing I knew, my father was in Cambridge trying to force me to have an abortion. You know how he and I are. The simple fact that he tried to force me was enough to make me refuse, especially after all the lip service he'd paid to Catholic dogma. But more than that, the pregnancy gave me a chance I'd never had before. An absolute excuse to break the pattern laid out for me before I was born. I didn't know what I wanted, but I knew I didn't want to spend four years at Ole Miss in a sorority full of girls majoring in fashion merchandising and looking for husbands."

"Thanks for telling me in time to change my plans."

A momentary look of penitence. "I'm sorry about that. I never told you to go there."