by Marilynn Talal
One summer college weekend, I drove out to the Hamptons with my friend Barbara, in her car, to stay in a rental near the beach. Anticipating happy party time, neither of us had checked the weather. Once there, people told us a hurricane was coming. If we didn’t leave immediately, we’d be stuck, unable to get away and in danger from flooding and violent winds.
By chance, at the party I saw Richard, a twenty-three-year-old I’d dated when I was eighteen. Richard offered to drive me home to New Rochelle, which would allow Barbara to return to Brooklyn without worrying about me and my long return journey.
At some point on the drive, Richard said he was tired. It was late, and he wanted to stop and stay overnight at his parents’ house in Great Neck, which was on the way, and promised to take me to New Rochelle the next morning. I didn’t want to spend the night at his parents, but, captive in his car, I couldn’t say “no.”
When we arrived in Great Neck, Richard settled in his old bedroom as his mother showed me to a guest room and gave me fresh towels. I got into my pajamas and went to sleep. At about six the next morning, sunlight streaming through the windows, a doorknob’s turn awakened me, and Richard appeared. I asked him why he was there, and he put his finger to his lips to indicate I should be quiet.
He then climbed on top of the bed, put his two legs in a straddle over my hips, and pulled down the blankets. There was no attempt to reach under my pajama top, no effort at tenderness or gestures to arouse me and give me pleasure. He was there for himself and was only interested in one thing: what was hidden beneath my pajama bottoms.
The events progressed too quickly for me to realize what was happening. I didn’t want to believe what was happening, what Richard was attempting. It was too threatening.
Richard tried to hold both my wrists in one of his hands and use the other to try to pull my pants down. I thought of screaming for his mother, but involving her was too embarrassing, too public, too confrontational. How could I possibly tell his mother that her son was trying to rape me? Rape. The word never occurred to me. I had reacted automatically to what he was doing and knew his mother would never believe “her darling son” would do something so vile. He had been raised in a good home. His behavior would somehow be my fault.
I fought back, grateful for my many childhood fights with my younger brother Stanley. We used to wrestle under our parents’ baby grand piano, wriggling and twisting on the living room carpet while we made jabs at each other. I was accustomed to defending myself with arms, legs, and fists. When I was a child, I needed a win to satisfy my pride, and I usually did. Stanley had arrived when I was two, and my feeling of displacement and competition with him was intense. With Richard, winning was even more important. I couldn’t endure the thought of violation and assault.
Richard and I struggled against each other in silence. Neither of us made a sound. I never told him to stop, never even thought of that. I had never told Stanley to stop either. We both understood we had to fight until one of us gave up. As Richard tried to overpower me, I pulled, with all my strength, against his grip to get one of my hands free and use it hold up my pants, which were still around my waist.
In the middle of our wrestling, while Richard was still on top of me, straddling my thighs, which were still covered up as they had been from the beginning, except for the blankets, suddenly he stopped what he had been doing and looked pensive. He glanced down at my pajama-covered hips, which were beneath his straddle, as though something was happening down there. An event I didn’t understand at the time must have occurred because, as unexpectedly as he had started it, he stopped our fight without a word, got off me and my bed, and walked out.
A huge feeling of relief spread over me. I had saved myself without understanding how. It was hard to believe, lying there. Many years later, when I had enough experience and knowledge, I could explain to myself what had probably happened. Our twisting bodies and Richard’s dominant position straddling my hips had aroused him and caused him to ejaculate, until he had no more energy or juice to fight for a more interesting encounter.
Richard and I met at breakfast and said not a word about what had happened. I thanked his parents for their hospitality, we got into Richard’s car, and he drove me back to my parents’ house in New Rochelle. That was the end of my time with Richard, never wanting to tempt my chances again with him.
I am fortunate that this attempt by Richard was the closest I ever came to a rape, even an attempted rape. But the need to be able to physically defend myself in an attack by a man who would be much stronger than Richard, stayed with me, and when I read about a course offered locally entitled, “Self-Defense for Women,” I signed up.
The course showed various strategies for countering the man’s greater physical strength by using vulnerabilities of eyes, neck, groin. In the class where we grappled hand to hand with the male instructor, I brought my knee up to his groin, as we had been instructed, because his sex was protected by a shield. Even so, I felt terrible when I saw how much pain doubled him over from my knee thrust—in spite of the shield.
This course helped me when I was returning to a friend’s house, after a meeting of poets. I’d parked my car and moved into the light of a streetlamp to look for her house keys when I heard footsteps. Immediately, I turned my back to the street, crouched down like a Sumo wrestler as we had been instructed to do in the self-defense class, weight evenly balanced on both feet over my lowered center of gravity, closed my purse and gripped the car key in my fist like a knife to take out his eye. I heard the footsteps move past me as he said, “Hello, Beautiful,” to my back. I turned as he was coming toward me, and I looked up into the man’s face. When he saw me crouched there, arms out, ready to fight with him, my purse ready to strike his head, my key pointing at his face like a knife, he turned and ran. I worried that he was going to get help to overcome me and quickly got back into the car and drove the 45 minutes home.
The next day, discussing what happened at another meeting with my poet friends, as my terror calmed down, it became clear to me that the would-be attacker was probably frightened by my crouching, balanced position, my huge, exaggerated size because I was wearing a very large poncho, and the two objects in my outstretched hands which could be weapons: my purse ready to strike his head and my key held like a knife poised to take out an eye.