Thief (4 page)

Though I was just sixteen when Frank L—— raped me, I was not a virgin or even virginal. At twelve I fooled around with boys
in the woods, and by the time I was thirteen I already knew what
counted was the size of my breasts and my skill at giving a hand job. While I liked school and had been praised by my teachers
for the books I read and the poems I wrote, I quickly realized those activities were nearly useless.

I’m not sure how my perceptions started, but I assume it began with my own parents. There was the derisive, ugly way my father
spoke to my mother in everyday conversation (“Dry up, old lady. Shut up and dry up …”); the lack of interest he showed in
anything relating to her or my brother or me when measured against a drinking bout with his cronies; the pile of old
Playboy
and
Pent-house
magazines he had stacked in his closet, which I pored over whenever I was alone in the house. I liked looking at the women’s
breasts and vulvas, and was excited by them, though I doubt I could have explained my excitement at age nine or ten.

Yet it wasn’t just my father. When I was fifteen and had a boy-friend in the Army, I asked my mother to take pictures of me
posing in my bathing suit so I could have something to send to Dale, and my mother consented. And though my one-piece bathing
suit was modest enough, it was still a bathing suit, and it was still my mother taking the pictures. When the photos came
back, I saw that in most of them, my mother had cut me off at the calf and top of the head, seemingly focusing the camera
on my torso. The roll of film included a couple of full-length poses that showed all of me, and I picked those to send to
Dale. The other photos, the chopped-off ones, were imperfect. Ruined. Still, I kept them, and now whenever I happened to come
across the envelope in among other keepsakes, I marveled not only at my long, pretty legs, but also at the fact that a mother
would take such photos of her fifteen-year-old daughter to send to a man.

But even those experiences did not explain who I was. There was a certain wildness in me that had nothing to do with my parents.
It was solely mine, and had been since I was young. In the
second and third grades, I played with other little girls in my neighborhood, and with one girl in particular. Our games always
seemed to involve taking off our clothes and sucking on each other’s nipples. When Shelagh stayed over one night, we spent
an hour doing our familiar routine, and then Shelagh pulled away from my chest.

“This is getting kind of boring,” she said. “What else can we do?”

I thought for a moment and then I said, “We can kiss each other there, where we pee.”

“Won’t it taste sour?”

I didn’t know how to answer, so we didn’t do it. Not long after, Shelagh moved away and I didn’t see her again.

By fifth grade, I liked the shivery feeling I got whenever I heard one song that was always playing on the radio.
Sundown
, the song said,
you better take care.
The first time or two I heard the song I thought it was about a killing, a murder that took place in some frightening way.
But then I listened to all the words and realized the song was about love. Love that made you creep around someone’s back
stairs. And even though I didn’t understand anything about the adult side of the song— how love could be a dark thing, or
how love could leave a person feeling angry and mean— because of the singer’s voice I came to believe love could make you
sullen and lost and dangerous. Like you were losing. I believed in the ideas even though I didn’t fully understand them. What
ever the ideas meant, I knew I wanted to be like the woman in the song. Hard. Eleven years old, and that was what I wanted
for myself, to have someone feel about me the way the man who sang the song felt about someone.

When I was fifteen, my twenty-two-year-old GI boyfriend had initiated me into all variations of intercourse before he went
into Basic Training, and by sixteen I was so certain of the thing between
my legs that I would let nothing else guide me. To have such sureness at that age is often perilous for young women, leading
as it does to misalliances and children born too early. That was what my mother feared— but she needn’t have. All I had to
do was look at her life to know there was no connection between plea sure and children. I was not about to jeopardize my future
or my plea sure by getting pregnant, and since I didn’t want to mess around with pulling out or rubbers or all that stupidity,
I went on birth control pills. I stayed on them through my teens and into my twenties and thirties.

So even if I was sixteen when Frank L—— raped me, I was a different sort of sixteen: not a virgin, in love with my own orgasms,
already certain my main worth in the world was sexual. I don’t mean I was aware that I thought of myself that way— I just
thought I saw things as they were. That’s what I mean when I say it was probably inevitable some harm should come to me. At
sixteen I so much wanted to be part of the adult world, I started pounding on the door. Not surprisingly, it let me in.

I USUALLY SWAM FIRST THING
, before too many people were out on the lake and before the sun shone high and hot. Sometimes I did a shallow dive off the
end of the dock and plunged into the water, but this morning I felt quiet and slow, so I walked along the shoreline a little
way, getting used to the water. When I walked past one jack pine that leaned out over the lake, though, I saw something that
made me stop before I was even knee-deep.

A black shape was moving through the water. There in the shallows, the shape rose and turned, circled, turned again. Edges
altered, and the thing kept shifting, rippling. It took me a few seconds to understand that the one shape was actually hundreds
of shapes.

Each was ink-black, each one had horns and whiskers, and each swam above and beside and below its brothers and sisters. I
looked around and saw the two parents swimming nearby, keeping watch. They were as big as my foot— or, put another way, as
small as my foot.

I backed away. I backed away, but I kept watching the school of catfish and the black parents. The whole thing was so unexpected—
the fish were so dark and sinuous that I felt like I was watching some private rite. And as I backed away, the only thing
I could think of besides the dark swirl was how I could describe it. Not to Kate, whom I hadn’t seen since school had let
out and to whom I’d sent one hastily written postcard, and not to Julian, and not just because of our last conversation.

I wanted to describe what I’d seen to Breville.

Our first letters back and forth had been so hard, filled with ugly details from my own rape and his crime, but that morning,
by wanting to tell Breville about the sinuous school of baby catfish, I understood it was more than just me processing emotions
from the rape from so many years ago. Maybe it was because I was away from friends, but by the time I actually wrote Breville
a letter, I had been talking to him in my head for hours. I realized what he had predicted had somehow become true. He had
become some type of friend to me.

It sounds like you saw a school of bullheads swimming
, Breville wrote after he received my letter.

Black ones, from the sound of it, though there are also yellow and brown ones. You can bag as many as you like and they make
good eating. I used to catch them sometimes at my grandpa’s and they always put up a fight. But the way you describe them,
they sound beautiful and I’m not sure I would ever want to catch one again. They want to live their bullhead lives too, don’t
they?

“I swam clear across the lake this evening,” I wrote next. “I don’t know how far it is, but it took me just about an hour
of slow swimming to go from my dock to across the way and then back again. Merle said I could have asked him to follow me
in a boat, but that would have ruined it, to have someone there. The maps say
the lake goes 80 feet down in one spot, and I swam over it. Just me in my pink-flowered bathing suit.”

Breville replied:

You don’t know how I envy you. I haven’t been swimming for the last seven years. Of course I haven’t. The thing I remember
about swimming in a lake is that you think the water will be colored somehow but it isn’t. It is crystal clear when you look
up at the sky. It would be good to feel what it’s like to float again. Hell, I’d like to get water up my nose again. Ha ha.
I would even be happy to shovel some snow these days. Though I guess that isn’t likely in July, even in Minnesota. But seriously,
the way you describe the lake I almost can feel it. How big is that lake anyway? It must be not too big if it took you half
an hour to cross it, but it must not be too small either.

After reading Breville’s letter, I thought if I could get a response written that day, and if I drove into town to mail it
off , I might get a second letter back that week, on Saturday.

But almost as soon as I thought that, it seemed crazy. The idea that I had nothing better to do with my day than to write
a letter, that I would make a special trip into town to mail it— all of it seemed foolish. Breville was a perfect correspondent
because he was incarcerated. A convicted rapist with time on his hands. I was as isolated as Julian said I was. So I laid
Breville’s pages on the table. Left the cabin before I could change my mind and begin a reply.

Even though it was only nine o’clock at night, downtown was deserted except for the high school kids who took over the lower
end of Main with their cars and music. I’d spent the day out, wading
across the headwaters of the Mississippi at the state park and scouring antique shops for old photos. Just now I’d thoroughly
poked around the small bookstore in town, accompanied by the resident beagle, who followed me from shelf to shelf until the
store closed. But now all the touristy stores were closed and so was the Antler, where I could have at least gotten a cup
of coffee. So I thought I’d have one drink and shoot the breeze with the bartender, and that would mark the end of the day
of being out and about.

But it was not the bartender who was eager to talk to me at the Royal, the big bar on Main. Just moments after I got served,
a guy came over and stood beside my barstool.

“Do you want to hear my new saying?” he asked me.

He looked to be in his forties, and he had both stringy hair and a receding hairline. He was also wearing a T-shirt that said
my
BALLS ITCH
.

“Well, I’ll tell it to you anyway,” he said. “ ‘Shit happens. Flush it.’ Pretty good, huh?”

I shook my head and said nothing.

“Can I buy you a beer?”

“I have a drink,” I said.

“After you finish that.”

“I’m not much of a drinker,” I said, and slid down off the bar-stool. I was already thinking it had been a mistake to come
in, but I figured there had to be at least one person in the place who had a better sense of fashion and free speech.

At the back of the bar there were pool tables and a jukebox, so I made my way there. As I checked out the music, I felt like
I had drifted back in time as well as space because all the music was old rock about dirty deeds. The theme of the place became
even more vivid to me when, in the short time I was standing there, the song changed from “Fat-Bottomed Girls” to “Big Balls.”

“What’re you going to play?”

It was the guy from the bar.

“Here’s a quarter,” he said. “You pick.”

I was about to tell him I didn’t need his hard-earned money, but before I could say anything, one of the pool players walked
over, lightly holding his cue. He looked at me, and though my expression didn’t change, I nodded slightly, acknowledging him.
He looked down to rest the bottom of his cue on his boot, and then he looked at the guy from the bar.

“Leave her alone, buddy,” he said.

My Balls Itch put up one hand. For a second it looked as if he might say something, but the wheels in his head turned and
he thought better of it. Instead of talking, he just shook his head and walked away.

“He’s a fuckhead,” the player said. “He won’t bother you no more.”

“Thanks.”

“You from around here?”

Even with his baseball cap on, I could see he had that close-cropped hair that young men favored. He was long and lanky, and
his neck and face were burned red from the sun. His white T-shirt didn’t say anything but it was gray around the collar.

“I’m up from the Cities,” I said.

“This place is full of fuckheads. I’m less of a fuckhead than the rest, though.”

“I see,” I said. “Well, thanks again.”

I put my drink down on a table and this time I kept walking to the very back of the bar, to the door with the exit sign above
it and that I figured led onto the alley behind Main.

When I got outside there was still a bit of light in the sky. It looked electric blue and violet.

I knew there was some humor to it all. A restaurant in town advertised itself as “not a half-bad place to eat,” and now I’d
met
someone who was less of a fuckhead than the rest. The town was nothing if not modest. I’d have to tell Julian about it.

He hadn’t been wrong about my isolation, only about my willingness to do something about it. I wasn’t a joiner, and maybe
that was where I went wrong. If I’d ever taken the time to be part of something, I might have met a man with whom I had something
in common. I might have at least stayed away from places like the Royal. But instead I was a loner. As much as I sometimes
longed for company, I was like most loners— content with my discontent and happiest in my own company.

Somehow it was all easier to bear in that little town, though, under the blue-black sky. I got into my car and drove back
home to the cabin.

THOUGH I TYPED
my initial letters to Breville, I now usually hand-wrote them, keeping his most recent letter fanned out in front of me.
There was nothing I couldn’t tell him if I was willing to write long enough, and there was nothing he didn’t at least try
to understand and respond to.