1980
was the year my advisor threw me out of his class
for being what he called “an unsavory element.”
“If savory is salty, does that mean I’m sweet?”
I asked. He didn’t laugh. He told me to grab my books
and leave. ASAP. I had written two stories in his class,
the first a fairy tale about a princess who despised
all the princes in the land. Princes,
she told her dad, just weren’t her thing.
He told me to write what I knew instead. So I wrote
a true story about Joey Crutchfield who entered my room|
at midnight after I had gone to the bathroom
and forgotten to lock the door to my dorm room
when I went back to bed. His intentions,
he said, were honorable, and then he told me
how pretty I was. Neither statements were true.
I managed to get him to leave and write about it
afterwards, only I renamed him Crotchforth,
and when I read the story aloud, everyone knew
who I was talking about and they laughed and clapped
and word spread—it escalated into a minor campus event
until Joey called me on the phone to threaten
me. He said his daddy would sue me for libel.
Yes, his daddy was a hotshot New York lawyer
who always had his son’s best interests at heart.
Needless to say, I was quivering in my LL Bean
boots. This was years before the #MeToo
movement—not long after a freshwoman
called Diz was spoon-raped at a frat party
by six men—whom she accused later, though
she was so drunk, how could she be sure?
That was the frat boys’ excuse, and the dean
nodded his assent. So did the college president.
Everyone whispered about Diz, and the boys
waved spoons when she walked past in the cafeteria
as if she were a joke until the day she left school
and never came back. “Imagine it,” we whispered.
“Waking up to a man eating orange sherbet
out of your crotch.” Did they really do that?
I still think about her sometimes
when I see the names of those frat boys,
now in their sixties with their wives and children
and Facebook posts of sunny, white-fenced lives,
all of them lawyers or doctors or hedge fund managers.
The worst is in Congress. Of course he is.
And Diz? Who knows? Like many women who are victims,
she changed her name, her address, her hair color,
her history. She cut off her college contacts,
stopped answering letters and phone calls.
“I’m not here. Don’t bother leaving a message,”
the voice on her answering machine said.
She learned how to be as invisible as a mouse
in a field with a red-tailed hawk overhead.
But these days I imagine her coming back
as Superwoman with a fork or knife in hand,
a smile on her crimson lips—ready at last to pay back
those creeps, the ones who fucked up her life
and mine. And yours, too, I bet. I keep thinking
they need to have their balls forked—just once. Maybe twice.
Not too much—nothing we’d truly regret.
