Thief (6 page)

I thought at first it was rudeness or stupidity that made him ask the question, but I knew from his letters that Breville
was anything but stupid. That made me wonder even more. Why hadn’t he ever asked another of his visitors, if he’d wanted to
know? And did he really think that because I was coming to see him, the guards would have power over me, too?

“I’m not the one who did anything wrong,” I said. “Besides, I wouldn’t go through it.”

Breville nodded. “I don’t blame you,” he said, and then he looked away from me. When he looked away, I wondered if he hadn’t
known the answer all along, if he hadn’t said what he said because he wanted to see my reaction. When I thought that, I could
feel my expression change and go hard. In another second, though, Breville was thanking me for making the trip down to Stillwater,
and he seemed so sincere I couldn’t maintain the coldness in my eyes.

When I said goodbye to Breville that first day, I wasn’t going to hug him, but after we got to the taped-off square where
inmates could touch and be touched, that was what I ended up doing. I put my arms quickly around Breville and felt his arms
go around me. I felt his body against mine. I thought I would be able to smell him, some kind of sour prison smell, or at
least the scent of his hair, but I smelled nothing. I pulled away and said goodbye.

THE SISTER OF MY RAPIST
was a girl I went to school with. We often sat together in classes and in homerooms because our last names started with the
same letter. Joy was tough, part of a crowd of kids who were hoods from the time of fifth or sixth grade. If you had parents
that were certain kinds of people— drunks and toughs, or just poor bastards— you had to be part of that crowd. Some kids might
have chosen the crowd out of wanting to be “tuff ,” the way it was spelled on the bathroom walls at school, but many people
had no choice. Joy didn’t. Her brothers made a name for themselves and the family with drinking and drugs, and charges like
assault and possession.

I did not know if Joy’s brothers were ever nice to her or what her family was like; neither of us talked much about home.
When we sat together in Mrs. Sander’s room, Joy sometimes told me how her mom and dad were fighting, or how her dad had been
drinking, but that was no different from what my parents did, or many parents did. But something made Joy’s family different.
Each of Joy’s three brothers had the same eyes, and each was wild and bad. The brothers were not clannish— there was enough
difference in their ages for them not to run together— but you just had to say the name
L—— and people knew, or believed they knew. What do you expect in a small Pennsylvania town, a deer-hunting and coal-mining
town, where nothing anyone does is hidden from anyone else?

Joy was the toughest girl and I was one of the smartest, and we both liked that we were friends with each other, that we could
be friends across the lines that divided us, even at that age. We were like heads of state when we talked about girls in our
grade, or school, or her boyfriends, and we listened to each other so carefully we were solemn. I was sitting at my desk in
Mrs. Sander’s room close to the end of seventh grade when Joy turned back to talk to me.

“It’s serious,” she said. “I have to talk to you.”

“What’s it about?”

“I can’t say here. It’s George,” she said. “I’ll tell you in gym.” As she leaned back over my desk to whisper just that much,
I could smell the strange pepper smell on her breath that she carried each day. It was not a bad smell, but I didn’t know
where it came from.

Joy and I were sitting on the hard benches of the girls’ locker room, away from the other girls, when she told me she thought
she might be pregnant.

“How late are you?”

“Two weeks.”

“You might or might not be,” I said. “Do you use something?”

“No,” she told me. “He just pulls out.”

“That doesn’t work,” I said. I’d read about it. “It just takes a little bit.”

Joy nodded. “I know.”

“Maybe you’re not,” I said, though I didn’t know how that could be. I wasn’t having sex yet— just fingerfucking and messing
around— but I knew how everything worked, and I felt scared for Joy. The idea of sex frightened me. Part of me couldn’t believe
Joy
was doing it already, and part of me wondered how she got unscared.

I sat with Joy until Miss Harvath blew her whistle for all of us to come out into the gym. I didn’t know what had made Joy
tell me instead of one of her other friends, but I think it was this: whenever she talked to me, what ever it was about, I
always listened with my whole self. Perhaps that sounds stupid, but I do not think it was. Think how seldom anyone listened
to you when you were thirteen.

It turned out Joy was not pregnant. She and George waited for me outside the middle school one morning to tell me. George
was old enough to drive, and he brought Joy in early to school. They both were waiting in the misty morning for me to come
up walking.

“I got it,” she said. She was hanging on to George’s jacket, one of her hands digging down into his pocket.

“That’s good,” I said. “Now you don’t have to worry.”

Joy pushed George away from her then and told him, “Go on. Kiss her.”

George walked toward me, put his arms around me, and kissed me on the mouth. It caught me by surprise. I didn’t know why Joy
wanted him to do it or why he would do such a thing— maybe because I knew so much about the two of them, or maybe because
it was a dare. Or perhaps Joy wanted to prove something to him: that I wasn’t a snob, and that she could procure me for him.
I didn’t know. I accepted the kiss.

Later on, when the two of them had some kind of fight, Joy made George call me on the phone to find out if she had been cheating
or not. It was summer and I hadn’t seen Joy since school let out, but I knew what to say, and I believed it.

“No,” I said. “She would never cheat. She is the best person I know.”

“Never?” George asked.

“It’s you she loves.”

I was some kind of final witness, a barometer of truth.

When Joy and I got to high school, she was exploratory and I was college prep, so we didn’t have homeroom together anymore,
and there was no class we had in common. Yet we continued to be friends, if distantly, and when some girls began to call my
house, accusing me of everything from stuffing my bra to thinking I was better than everyone else, it was Joy I went to.

“Who do you think it is?” she asked me when I got done telling her what was going on.

“I know one of them is Cheryl Korr. But I always hear two voices on the phone.”

“It’s probably that Jane Zimmerman. What do they say to you?”

“They say, ‘We don’t like the way you act.’ ”

“They don’t even know you.”

“I don’t know how else I’m supposed to act. I’m just being myself.”

“Cheryl doesn’t have any guts anyway,” Joy said. “I’ll talk to them. Next time I see them in the bathroom.”

And I knew she had done it, because one afternoon Jane Zimmerman called, crying, saying she was sorry.

“I didn’t want to make those calls to you,” she said. “I didn’t want to hurt you. It was Cheryl’s idea.”

No one called my house again.

The truth was I did think I was better than some people in my school. Certainly better than beefy Cheryl Korr. But I did not
think I was better than everyone, and I did not think I was better than Joy. Which was why the next thing that happened bothered
me so much, though I told myself it needn’t. No one else ever knew about it. It started with me and ended with me.

It happened one day in early spring of tenth grade. I was walking down the hall at school and saw Joy coming toward me. I
don’t know if I noticed from a long way off , or if it took me a few seconds to see.

Months earlier, I’d gone through my closet to get together old clothes to sell at the thrift shop in town. One of the things
I got rid of was a long-sleeved black shirt with a keyhole neckline. I loved the shirt in seventh grade, but once my breasts
got bigger, my mother told me it looked obscene and I felt funny wearing it.

That was the shirt Joy was wearing this particular day. My old shirt. It still had the button at the keyhole neck sewn with
white thread, the crummy fix-up job I’d done when I was too lazy to find a spool of black. The shirt was tight on Joy, too,
but that was part of the way she dressed: low hip-hugger jeans and tight shirts.

I told myself she never would have bought the shirt if she remembered me wearing it in the seventh grade, if she had known
it used to be mine. I told myself it didn’t really matter where people got their clothes from anyway. Still, I felt funny
that the shirt made its way to her, that she was getting her clothing from the thrift shop on South Main.

“Hey, Suzanne,” Joy said when we drew near each other in the hall, while I was staring at that button with white thread. I
could tell she’d seen me startle, but her face was not angry or embarrassed. Only puzzled.

“Hey, Joy,” I said back, and we kept on walking to get to class before the bell rang.

The night I was raped, my boyfriend Cree was doing one of his disappearing acts. He’d stood me up for a date earlier in the
week— left me sitting on the front steps, looking up and down the street, waiting for his green car to come driving up. When
he didn’t bother to even call to apologize, I told myself there were other places I could go for what he gave. I wasn’t the
same girl I’d been in seventh grade: when Cree stood me up, I not only had hurt feelings, but I also had to suppress all the
sexual imagining I’d been
doing for days. I loved Cree’s body so much, and I liked all the places we had sex: an old mine road in Ravine; a meadow up
on 895, where the Appalachian Trail ran; beside an abandoned farm-house in Deturksville, where we liked to take a blanket
under the dogwoods. Sometimes, in the night air, dogwood petals would fall on us.

Keil Ward had wild blond hair and blue eyes that slanted up at the outsides— or maybe it was just his high cheekbones that
made it seem that way. He was one of the men who flirted with me constantly when he saw me at the restaurant where I waited
tables, and he always asked me to go out with him after I got off my shifts. This particular night, after Cree stood me up
and a week before my seventeenth birthday, I finally said yes to him, and after my shift, it was Keil Ward who waited for
me in the side hallway of the restaurant.

When we walked to his truck he slipped his arm around me, and it thrilled me— he smelled different from Cree, and he was taller
and heavier. I wanted to know what it would be like to touch him. I wondered what his shoulders and chest would feel like
when we embraced, and I wondered what his mouth tasted like. He kissed my hair as we were walking and it felt good to have
him pay attention to me. I didn’t see the other person sitting in his truck until he opened the door. Then I saw.

“This is my friend Frank,” Keil told me. “You don’t mind if we drop him off , do you?”

I paused for one second and then Keil was lifting me into the truck and Frank L—— was reaching for me.

In truth, I didn’t know much about Frank L——. I knew his name and that he was the oldest in Joy’s family. He sat drinking
every night at the bar of the restaurant, but he never talked to me. He looked a little like Joy, though I do not like to
think of his face. He was twenty-seven, eleven years older than I was. Before he raped me, he kissed me and chewed at my pussy.
Then he fucked me so
hard he made small tears in my vagina, and the skin of my labia bruised and turned black. I don’t know if it would have made
a difference to him if he knew I was a friend of his sister, if he would have gone through with it all.

Even though Keil Ward set the thing up, even though he was the one who tricked me, I never called him my rapist. He held me
for Frank, pushed the hair from my face when Frank wanted to see— but he didn’t fuck me. He didn’t hurt my vagina. I sucked
his cock while Frank was fucking me, but that didn’t hurt. Keil’s jeans smelled like bleach and his penis tasted like medicine.
He was the one who helped me get dressed at the end.

In a couple days, it hurt to walk, and I knew I had to tell someone what had happened. So I talked to my French teacher and
she took me to the hospital. That’s when I found out I had herpes and gonorrhea. But there was no gun, no knife. Just Frank
L—— and his cock.

AS IT TURNED OUT
, Breville was the one who smelled me that day at the prison. I didn’t get the letter for a couple of days, but the evening
after our first visit, he wrote me,
We’re deprived of smells in here, so maybe we’re more sensitive. All I know is that after you left I could still smell you
on my clothes. I cannot tell you what it meant that you came to see me.

I hadn’t worn perfume, so Breville must have smelled the lotion I’d put on after my bath, or my shampoo, or their mix on my
skin and hair. Or maybe he simply smelled the me-ness of me. All I knew was that I felt alarmed and self-conscious about the
whole thing. It made me feel funny to know my scent had such a profound effect on Breville, but I knew most of what I was
responding to was Breville’s bluntness: he had smelled me. What ever the smell had been composed of hardly mattered— the scent
was mine, and Breville now knew that intimate thing about me. I felt embarrassed. Vulnerable. It reminded me of being in seventh
grade and the first time I let my seventh-grade boyfriend work his fingers up into my vagina. Afterward, when we were walking
out of the woods where we’d fooled around, he told me, “I can smell you on my fingers.” I thought it was bad that my vagina
had a smell, but then I saw him
keep finding ways to put his hand up to his face, and I didn’t worry so much.

After the initial panic I felt reading Breville’s letter, other thoughts began to surface. I’d been caught off guard by the
intimacy of what he’d written— he had
smelled
me— but there was something forthright about the revelation. His words had a directness I hadn’t encountered on any number
of dates with men who’d answered my ad: a young engineer who wanted a woman to spend time with him on his boat on Lake Minnetonka,
and who was so lonely that the void in his life made his face tense and brooding; a gold trader who was smooth and amorous
on the first date, pressing his erection into my belly upon saying goodnight, but who made excuses every time thereafter about
why he couldn’t go to a museum or out to dinner with me; or even the grave digger, whom I actually met for coffee, and who
appraised me by saying, “You look pretty good even if you do have a few miles on you.”