Tilting by Linda Henderson

Linda Henderson

Linda Bridget Henderson is a poet and creative nonfiction writer whose work explores memory, embodiment, and the long arc of survival. Her latest writing is forthcoming in Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature. She lives in Northern California.

Tilting

I used to think I had buried my violent encounter with you in an impermeable box deep within my psyche. For decades, it surfaced in flashes, always out of reach—as if in zero gravity, my hand drifting toward the box but never touching it.

Snippets leaked out now and then: the image of being pinned down on my back in the front seat of your car, the steering wheel inches above my cheek. There was no room to lift my head, no way to maneuver my arms for leverage, no chance to push you off my torso and out of my vagina. You held me like a vise, squeezing my shoulders and sides with a force born not of respect, but of power. Cowardly power, because I was incapacitated by the drug you slipped into my drink. You couldn’t have gotten it up if I had access to all my senses.

That blind date was a classic set-up. Even 46 years later, I can still see you at your frat party, crossing to the makeshift bar ten feet away and returning with my drink. I see myself watching you dance and smile, a stranger except for the thin trust I placed in the women at the sorority house who had arranged the date. I didn’t suspect the chloral hydrate until my mobility began to slip away.

The room tilted, not spun—the floor shifting up and down like a stage floor suspended by ropes, unseen hands raising and lowering its corners in broken choreography. Not the soft blur of wine, but the body’s own sudden disequilibrium. I had not experienced the floor moving before—until 40 years later, when a stroke left me, once again, at the mercy of someone else’s unseen hands.

I’m looking now at a photo of myself at 22, taken two months before my life’s path crossed yours. My nose and cheeks are sunburned from a winter ski trip, my forehead pale where my hat was pulled down low. I felt safe then, encircled by a network of friends and acquaintances who knew me and whom I knew. We had unspoken agreements at frat parties to watch out for each other. It was a net—flexible, protective.

That net was missing for me in Minneapolis. You must have smelled it. The place looked familiar enough—a college campus, a sorority house, a frat party—but I had no history there, no real bearings. It didn’t dawn on me until too late that I was so isolated.

I remember the cold cement floor of the sorority’s community shower after I escaped your car. I couldn’t get the water hot enough. My feet were numb against the tile as I pressed a warm washcloth between my battered thighs, blood trickling down my legs. More than anything, I was terrified someone would walk in and see me. I knew no one there. I was utterly alone.

And ashamed.

I’m 68 now, rereading that last line, asking why the shame was so immediate, so deep. There was no consent. You never asked. I never agreed. You muted me with the mickey and then muted me again with your violence.

I stayed mute for over 40 years.

But no more. No more.