Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl: A Memoir

by Jeannie Vanasco

We get seduced, right? Adam says. We end up identifying with the aggressor. We’ll get angry with the victim because she’s not doing the work of coming forward. It’s her not doing something that’s a problem again. I think of getting into a car accident, that analogy. If my hands are on the wheel, ten and two, and I’m obeying the law and somebody just whizzes through a light and T-bones me, I have to go to the hospital. I have to file the insurance claim. I have to do physical therapy. I have to go to psychotherapy. And I didn’t do anything. Even if the person who caused the accident, even if that person goes to physical therapy, it’s not going to improve my hip. Emotions aside—which this primarily is—but organizing your time, taking your time to talk to his parents, for example: Who cares to do that? It’s work. Why should you have to be the one? It’s very twisted.

He’s my brother, the poet says. I love my brother. Knowing about the rape, I tell him, that must be really hard for you. My dad, he beat him, the poet says. Really beat him after he found out. Violence with more violence. But I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t think about what he did. And you want to know the fucked-up thing? The other day, they all went golfing. My brother, the woman he raped, and my dad. I remember how after the rape, there was this whole boys will be boys attitude. And now it’s been years.

ME: The idea of the nice guy, though— HIM: Nice guys are a total lie. ME: A lot of times, when I meet a man, any man, I think—at the very start: Has this guy raped somebody? I hate that that’s my thinking. HIM: But it’s a reality too.

I return to Hannah’s essay, to the sentence I suggested cutting: A grown woman, now—or growing still—who has survived so much and still has so much to survive. I regret my suggestion. I want that line.