calling the shots
Like many of you I watched on TV as ten women delivered a news conference from the steps of the United States Capitol. As they shared their stories of the sexual abuse and cruelty inflicted upon them as children by Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, it was clear to anyone watching that these women have been suffering in silence and in shame for decades, forced to carry their pain alone.
I found myself imagining them as the 14 year old children they used to be – middle-schoolers, vulnerable and voiceless, unwittingly trapped in a structure of institutional complicity that allowed the cruelty to continue while protecting the perpetrators and silencing those children into adulthood.
Epstein. Maxwell. The Catholic Church. The Boy Scouts. USA Gymnastics and the Olympic Committee. Ohio State University. There’s a pattern of sexual abuse in childhood, an alarming prevalence with – as we saw this week – devastating impact. And, it’s not unique to the USA. In estimates released last Fall, UNICEF reported that over 370 million girls and women alive today – or 1 in 8 – experienced rape or sexual assault before the age of 18 and carry the trauma into adulthood, afraid and ashamed to talk about it.
I have never experienced sexual abuse. I have known only the kind of harassment and sexual misconduct that has been – and continues to be – unacceptably pervasive in the lives of many women. The first time it happened to me, I was walking home from school with a friend. It was dusk when a young man emerged from the shadows at the end of the Dublin road, pointed to his open fly, and asked us if we wanted to play with his furry friend. My friend and I ran home. We were afraid, but we laughed as though we weren’t. I didn’t tell my parents. I never told anyone. All these decades later, I remember the chill in the evening air, the sneer on that stranger’s face, and a kind of panic over not being believed if I told anyone he’d exposed himself to two little girls. So I learned to keep secret the fear that it must have been my fault or that nobody would believe me. I was ashamed.
I also find myself recalling, with disgust, the time a male supervisor conducted his annual employee appraisals with all his female subordinates in a local coffee shop. Except for mine. His assistant, a woman, scheduled my evaluation in the bar of a nearby Holiday Inn. It shocks me now to admit – even to myself – that I showed up for it. Even though I knew he was out of line, I was afraid. I was too intimidated to confront him, to ask why the different venue for me. And, I was too scared to tell his superiors or to confide in the other women – my peers. I didn’t even tell my husband, afraid of the consequences he would deal out to this misogynist. To be clear, this man did not touch me, but he succeeded in demeaning me, making me feel different and uncomfortable, seated with his arms behind his head, comfortable in his own skin, talking quietly to me presumably to make me move closer to him. Worse, he got away with it just as he had previously – as I later learned – with similar behaviors towards other women.
The year my daughter was born, I discovered Gavin de Becker’s “Gift of Fear” – a book about how to predict dangerous behavior and how being nice does not pay:
Niceness does not equal goodness. We must learn and teach our children that niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction. It is not a character trait. People seeking to control others, almost always present the image of a nice person in the beginning.
This lesson I passed down to my daughter so she would always be safe. Safe and sound.
She has often told me that sometimes when faced with a challenge, she copes by weighing it against the worst thing that has already happened to her – the death of her dad. It’s been over a decade, during which other men, good friends of mine and my own father, have tried to fill the space he left behind. Perhaps afraid that I might fall apart as her only parent, more aware than I of my own fragility – they were there for her in those milestone moments when dads should be there. There.
There, sitting under a Jacaranda tree with her as she held her dying cat; there, cheering her on as she strode across the stage to receive her high school diploma; there, teaching her to drive; and, there, making a Christmas Day feel almost like Christmas Day.
She is kind and warm, a helper, with a personality made for customer service. It made sense that she would find a part-time job in a department store when she was a teenager. Patient and pleasant, a pleaser, she was often assigned to work in the fitting room. She was the perfect store associate to calm harried customers in a hurry to find something that fits. To her embarrassment I’m sure, I went into the store one Sunday afternoon and – worse – I even tried on clothes in the fitting room, so she could not avoid me, the way teenagers avoid their parents.
I didn’t notice the numbers scrawled on her hand
I didn’t notice because I was too busy embarrassing her the way I used to do when I dropped her off at junior high. Mortified that her friends might hear “my music” on the radio, she used to turn it down before getting out of the car. Then I would wait until she was on the sidewalk, turn up a Tom Petty tune and yell out the window for everyone to hear, “I love you.” Mothers. We’re like that.
Mothers also know instantly when something’s wrong. I can tell by the first syllable of “hello” when she calls if it is, for example, ‘a grief day.’ I can sense it. But I somehow missed that something was wrong in the department store. I missed it. How could I have missed it?
It wasn’t until she came home from her shift a few hours later, that she told me. She had written on her hand 4:30 – 4:45, the time period during which a middle-aged man – a customer – had inappropriately touched her in response to her telling him she was sorry the red shirt he was returning hadn’t worked out. She was alone. She was vulnerable. She froze after he put his hands on her, but somehow thought to inform security of the time – 4:30 – 4:45 – so they could check the security videotape and “just keep an eye on him in case he came back and bothered anyone else.”
My darling girl worked her shift for four more hours and told herself that because she was “alright,” management would probably minimize the situation. That’s exactly what they did. Nobody came to check on her. She ended her shift, walked to her car alone, and came home to me.
She told.
With time to stew on this, to raise hell, to broadcast it all over social media and report it to store management, to confirm that, yes, detectives were looking into it, and to ensure that a policy would be enforced to require at least two employees in the fitting room at all times, the lingering issue remains. There are menacing men – and women – who move among us every minute of every day and that women who look just like my daughter – my mother, my friends, me – continue to be sexually harassed in public places.
Vehemently opposed to “mommy fighting her battles” I don’t know if she understood I wanted to find that stranger and tear him apart until there was nothing left of him. I wished I had remembered to tell her to watch a video I’d recently seen featuring an older Gavin de Becker. There he was on YouTube telling Lena Dunham in response to a question about how young women can best protect themselves against violence:
. . . Do not accept the scam that violence is a strategy only understood by men. There’s a universal code of violence, and that’s not a code you have to crack; it’s all inside you. When I used to give more speeches, I would ask audiences, “Is there anybody here who feels they could never hurt anybody?” A bunch of people would raise their hands and say, “I could never be violent under any circumstances.” If it’s a woman, I would say, “Well, what about if somebody was hurting your child?” “Oh, oh, oh, well then I could rip, burn, bite, scrape, scratch, poke, shoot, stab,” and so the resource is in all of us.
That resource is in all of us. Except, we don’t really believe it, do we?
One evening a few years ago, I went to a Phoenix bar to play pool with one of my best friends – like me, an older woman, or as we like to say of ourselves, “women of a certain vintage.” For reference, a bad thing had happened to me the previous summer, and playing pool became a good thing that lifted me up and out of it. It was a perfect distraction.
We found the quintessential dive bar – a hole in the wall without windows, and smoky even in the absence of smoke, three pool tables, a parking lot aromatic with weed, Bob Seger on the jukebox, and bartenders who tell stories and listen to yours and call everyone ‘sweetie.’ You get the idea.
I loved the idea of playing pool, mostly because of Paul Newman in Color of Money. I didn’t even care about being any good at it. I wanted just one time to make that sound – the crack that accompanies a great opening break.
My friend and I tried to learn how to play better by watching YouTube videos on our phones or we would ask the advice of guys who brought their own sticks to the bar on League Night, which also happened to be Ladies Night, or on Sundays when it was free to play.
After a few months of practice and time spent with the man I had recently met, the man who still quickens my heart and teaches me how to make the shots he makes me call, I grew less embarrassed by my game. In fact, I soon had a bridge he deemed acceptable, and every once in a while I won. He wasn’t with me that evening when I put up my quarter. Oblivious to my surroundings as I sometimes am, I was only vaguely aware of a young man seated at the bar behind us. Remembering him now, I recall shorts, T-shirt, flip-flops, receding hairline, slightly overweight. Unremarkable. No hint of danger. I remember half-noticing him talking to my friend, but I thought he was only asking about the boxes from a local pizzeria stacked on the bar and if anyone could have a slice. Yes. Anyone could – it was that kind of bar.
She didn’t tell me until later that he had rubbed against her and asked if she liked playing with balls. She froze the way so many of us do, later telling me,
Yeah, he hit on the old broad first.
Subsequently, when it was her turn to play, he sidled towards me, and said quietly, “Hey, hey, pretty lady. Your friend says you like playing with balls. Is that true?”
Hey. Hey.
Typically, I would have said nothing and walked away, but this time I felt an approximation to violence. A foreign and empowering feeling, it made me neither fear him nor ignore him. Nor did I run away. I don’t know what shifted in me, but something did. Clutching my cue – and wanting to break it over his head – I eye-balled him and never looked away as I told him, coolly and quietly, “Yes. Yes, I do. But you will never know since you don’t have any. Now get the f**k out of my space.”
I almost scared myself.
Now I am no stranger to profanity. Born and bred in Northern Ireland, those words flew out of me like razor blades, and I never looked away as he slithered out the back door. Here’s what’s important. I still felt guilty about cursing at him, about losing my cool, and – even worse – wondering if perhaps it had been the way I had smiled, the silky summer top I was wearing, the cut of my jeans, or the length of my legs – wondering if it had been my fault.
A rush of questions and self doubt – was it because I was in a bar on a Friday night without a man? He would not have said it had I been with a man, would he? Had I asked for it? Had I? And, if I am honest – mindful that I am middle-aged, postmenopausal and most of the time most likely invisible to men on the make – should I have been grateful for the attention? This is the maddening and shameful contradiction that sends me, recoiling and ashamed, to the disconcerting reality that I am no longer the proverbial spring-chicken, therefore, attention from a young man must mean I’ve “still got it.” Really? Yes, really. This confounds me and makes me want to cry.
Why did I think it was my fault. It wasn’t. Was it?
Of course it wasn’t, but I still questioned myself.
And then what happened? Well, the next day and the next, I stepped into the world wearing whatever I choose. I’ll “sparkle and enchant” and risk being called flirtatious which might sound very much like “you’re asking for it.” My daughter has continued to be good – but perhaps not as nice – to strangers.
Like a thief in the night, those men – and every other man who has ever touched me or taunted me or told me I smell real nice when I’m standing next to him in line at an electronics store or called me a stuck-up bitch and told me to suck his dick because I didn’t smile back – has taken something from me – and I’m not sure how to get it back. What I know for sure is that silence won’t get it back.
Sitting here at my kitchen table a million miles away from that little girl walking home from school, I’m thinking about those women who spoke on the steps of the Capitol about their horrific abuse, the years of trauma, and the cost of their silence. I’m thinking about how the White House ordered a fly-over during their press conference, hoping perhaps that the roar of fighter jets would prevent us from hearing what those women had to say. Not this time. We heard them. We all heard them. And then we heard the President of the United States disregard them and say their abuse is just a “democrat hoax.”
As I write, GOP leaders are urging members not to sign the Epstein petition to release the files and demand transparency and justice for these women. Still calling the shots.
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