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By Root 12494 0

groaned like the others. But the hand with its rigid central finger—working with surgical skill and haste, unbelievably assertive as it probed and burrowed—took care of that, causing simple panic to be superseded in her mind by the shocked and horrified disbelief of anyone experiencing sudden digital rape. For such it was, no random and clumsy grope but a swift all-out onslaught on, to put it simply, her vagina, which the disembodied finger sought like some evil, wiggling little rodent, quickly circumvented the silk, then entered at full length, causing her pain, but less pain than a kind of hypnotic astonishment. Dimly she was conscious of fingernails, and heard herself gasp “Please,” certain of the banality, the stupidity of the word even as she uttered it. The whole event could not have been of more than thirty seconds’ duration when finally the loathsome paw withdrew and she stood trembling in a suffocating darkness which it seemed would never know light again. She had no idea how long it was before the lights came on—five minutes, perhaps ten—but when they did, and the train began to move with a shuffling around of bodies, she realized that she had not the slightest way of knowing her attacker, submerged somewhere amid the half-dozen male backs and shoulders and protruding paunches surrounding her. Somehow she managed to flee the train at the next stop.

A straightforward, conventional rape would have done less violation to her spirit and identity, she thought later, would have filled her with less horror and revulsion. Any atrocity she had witnessed in the past five years, any outrage she herself had suffered—and she had known both past all recounting—had not numbed her to this gross insult. A classical face-to-face rape, however repellent, would at least permit the small gratification of knowing your assailant’s features, of making him know that you knew, quite aside from the chance it presented, through a grimace or a hot level stare or even tears, of registering something: hatred, fright, malediction, disgust, possibly just derision. But this anonymous stroke in the dark, this slimy and bodiless entry from the rear, like a stab in the back from some vile marauder unknown to you forever; no, she would have preferred (she told me many months later when distance from the act allowed her to regard it with a saving hint of humor) a penis. It was bad enough in itself, yet she could have borne the episode with comparative strength at some other time in her life. But now her distress was compounded by the way it upset the fragile balance of her newly renovated psyche, by the manner in which this looting of her soul (for she felt it to be that as much as her body) not only pushed her back toward the cauchemar, the nightmare from which she was ever so delicately and slowly trying to retreat, but actually symbolized, in its wanton viciousness, the very nature of that nightmare world.

She who had for so long been off and on literally naked and who, these few months in Brooklyn, had so painstakingly reclothed herself in self-assurance and sanity had again by this act, she knew, been stripped bare. And she felt once more the freezing cold of the spirit. Without giving a specific reason for her request—and telling no one, not even Yetta Zimmerman, what had happened—she asked Dr. Blackstock for a week off from work and went to bed. Day after day in the balmiest part of summer she lay asprawl with the blinds drawn down to admit only thin yellow slivers of light. She kept her radio silent. She ate little, read nothing, and rose only to heat tea on her hot plate. In the deep shadows she listened to the crack of ball against bat and the shouts of boys in the baseball fields of the park, drowsed, and thought of the womblike perfection of that clock into which as a child she had crawled in her fancy, afloat on a steel spring, regarding the levers, the rubies, the wheels. Ever threatening at the margin of her consciousness were the shape and shadow, the apparition of the camp—the very name of which she had all but rejected from her private