Standing Still
For a while when I was twenty-three I worked at a restaurant in downtown Raleigh. The place wasn’t strictly vegetarian, but it leaned in that direction. “Natural,” people called it. My pay wasn’t much—three fifty an hour—but lunch was provided and I could occasionally take home leftovers: half-moons of stale pita bread, cups of beige tahini dressing. Lettuce. Twice a week the cook would roast turkeys, and after she had carved off the meat for sandwiches, I was allowed the carcasses, which I would carry back to my apartment and boil for soup. This I would eat with mayonnaise-smeared crackers or maybe an omelet filled with rice.
My average day at the restaurant started at eleven thirty and ended three hours later, earning me, after taxes, around forty dollars a week. My rent was a hundred fifty a month, and in order to pay it, I had to take on other part-time jobs: painting an apartment if I was lucky, or helping out on construction sites—work I got, and very meagerly, through word of mouth. I should have quit the restaurant and found something more substantial, but I told myself I needed the free time, needed it for my real work, my sculpture. This wasn’t completely unfounded. I’d been in a couple of juried shows, one at the state art museum. For a few hours every day I applied myself. I bundled sticks, I arranged things in cardboard boxes. I typed cryptic notes onto index cards and suspended them from my ceiling.
I could have easily held a full-time job, then come home at night and tied twigs together, but in a way I needed the poverty, needed it as proof that I was truly creative. It was a cliché, of course, but one that was reinforced every time you turned around. People didn’t say “artist,” they said “starving artist,” so even if you weren’t doing anything of consequence, as long as you were hungry you were on the right track, weren’t you?
Being broke was also an excuse to stay put. When I was twenty there’d been no stopping me. I’d been fearless—the type who’d hitchhike to Mexico on a dare. I lived in San Francisco for a while, and in Oregon. Then I returned to my parents’ basement and lost whatever nerve I’d ever had. Since I’d come back to Raleigh, my most daring achievement was to move into my own apartment, this at my father’s insistence and done practically at knifepoint. Meaning well, my mother would visit with groceries. “I just thought you could use some meat,” she’d say, handing me a blood-soaked bag with ground beef and pork chops and sometimes twenty dollars in it.
My situation improved somewhat in the winter of 1981, when my sister Gretchen moved into the apartment upstairs. Because I was a few years older, she looked up to me; not so much that it strained her neck, but enough to make me feel that I wasn’t completely worthless. When I saw myself through my parents’ eyes, I saw a worm crawling through mud and shit toward a psychedelic mushroom, but when I saw myself through hers, I felt that things were possibly not as bad as they seemed. I wasn’t broken, just resting, readying myself for the next big thing.
Gretchen had just completed two and a half years of college in the mountains of North Carolina, at the same school I had gone to for a while. Now she was hoping to transfer to the Rhode Island School of Design, promising that if she got in, she’d never refer to it as “Risdee.”
“We’ll see about that,” I said, knowing that when a person gets busy, the first things to go are the extra syllables.
Gretchen submitted her portfolio, and while waiting to see if she’d been accepted, she enrolled in an entomology class at NC State and took a waitressing job at a pizza parlor near the university. At the end of every shift she’d collect a couple of leftover slices, some with the mushrooms or pepperoni picked off, and bring them to me wrapped in foil. Then I’d get high and she’d trot out her insects, one of which was usually languishing in her killing jar. This she carried everywhere she went, a portable gas chamber for any lacewing, caddis fly, or camel cricket unfortunate enough to catch her attention.
As spring arrived and her death toll mounted, I found extra work at the university, modeling for a life-drawing class. I didn’t do it nude, or even shirtless—I was far too modest—and for that reason I was called in only occasionally. Because I was clothed, the instructor, a woman named Susan, encouraged me to arrive with a variety of outfits, the more conflicting prints the better. “And don’t forget hats!” she said.
When frozen stock-still before a roomful of students, I’d find that my thoughts usually drifted toward money, one instance in particular when I had it in my grasp and foolishly let it slip away. That had happened shortly after the New Year, when I’d gone with a friend to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. Before setting out to see the collection, we left our things with the woman at the coat check. When it came time to leave, I presented this same woman with my stub, and after searching around in her racks, she returned to hand me a full-length mink, auburn-colored and lined with emerald green satin. It was much heavier than I’d expected, like holding a bear that had fainted in my arms. After thinking it might be a trick, I realized that the woman wasn’t paying attention. All the easier, then, to turn around and walk out the door. I was close enough to feel the cold air on my face when I chickened out and returned to the coat check. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but you seem to have made a mistake.”
The woman looked at the mink laid before her on the counter. “And you’re just now noticing it?” she asked.
“What a bitch,” I said to my friend, walking to the car in my thrift-store overcoat. “She should have been thanking me. Better still, she should have rewarded me.”
How stupid can you get? I now thought, standing before a classroom with a paisley turban on my head. That mink could have made a real difference in my life. It wasn’t exactly stealing, I reasoned, not technically. The coat’s rightful owner would have been compensated, so who, really, would it have harmed?
The building that Gretchen and I lived in—a large shabby house now sliced into apartments—was located midway between downtown and the university. Neither of us knew how to drive, so when going to work or school, we either walked, cycled, or begged people for rides, just like we had when we were children. Half a mile away, on the other side of a fine, well-manicured neighborhood, there was a shopping center called Cameron Village. It included a twenty-four-hour supermarket, and while walking home from it one night, a bag of groceries in one hand and her killing jar in the other, my sister was attacked by a man who came from behind and tried to drag her into the bushes.
He had the element of surprise, but Gretchen’s tall, at least for a Sedaris, and powerful. As soon as she got her bearings, she broke loose and headed to the nearest house for help. No lights came on, so she ran three blocks down the middle of the street and onto our front porch. I heard a banging on my door, and when I opened it she bolted past me into the kitchen, then stood trembling and mute—in shock, most likely, and with leaves in her hair. I phoned the police and set about hiding my drugs. After that I called my parents, aware that I was stealing someone else’s news, and aware too of how dramatic I sounded. “Gretchen’s been attacked.”
The officer who arrived began by saying that he’d been in my apartment once before. “It was a narcotics case, years ago,” he told me, looking from the kitchen to the living room, where dozens of index cards dangled from the ceiling. He took my sister’s statement, and as he drove off to canvass the area, our parents pulled up, my mother saying before she’d even set her purse down that this was all Gretchen’s fault. “Walking to the store at eleven o’clock at night, you were as good as asking for it!”
Our father, who has always distorted time to suit his purposes, put the blame on me. “It was one o’clock in the morning, and you let your sister wander the streets by herself?”
“It wasn’t one,” I said. “It’s not even one now.”
“Aw, baloney.”
The policeman returned carrying Gretchen’s grocery bag along with a mayonnaise jar containing a half-dead moth and a ball of cotton soaked in fingernail polish remover. “Is this…yours?” he asked.
My father gave my sister his “now I’ve seen it all” look. “Oh, that’s nice,” he said. “Caught yourself a pretty little butterfly while you were traipsing home alone at two in the morning?”
The following day he took Gretchen to the police station, where she was scheduled to look through mug shots. The fellow who’d attacked her had been black. She’d noticed he was wearing a white T-shirt, but then her glasses got knocked off and it all became a blur.
“All right,” said the policeman. “Let’s talk about pants. Think now—were they long or short?”
When Gretchen said “long,” my father slapped his palm on the tabletop. “There you go,” he said. “Now we’re getting somewhere!”
After that day’s shift at the natural-foods restaurant, I returned to my apartment and found my dad and sister waiting for me. “We can’t count on the police to catch this guy,” my father said. “So what we’re going to do is ride around and see if we can’t find him ourselves.”
“We’re going to drive around and look for a black man?” I asked.
“With long pants and a white T-shirt on,” Gretchen added. “Clothes he couldn’t possibly have changed because they’re permanently attached to his body.”
“Don’t be a smart-ass,” our father said. “This person tried to rape you, don’t forget. You think it’s just a onetime thing, like, ‘Well, that didn’t work, so I guess I’ll turn my life around, maybe sell ice cream instead’?”
He wasn’t the only one who was angry. All morning at work I’d imagined myself going back in time and coming across this person as he attacked my sister. In the fantasy I was just walking along, minding my own business at eleven o’clock on a Wednesday night, when I heard a woman scream and saw some movement in the bushes. At this, I grabbed the guy by the collar, saying something polite but at the same time hostile, like, “Excuse me, friend…” Then I imagined hitting him the way men in movies did, my fist making contact with a smart cracking sound, his jaw splitting open like a ripe melon. Once I got him down on the ground, I’d pound on him until Gretchen jumped in, saying, “David, stop! Stop before you kill him.”
It was an engaging little daydream but would have been a lot more satisfying if the guy had been white, or at least whitish, a Spanish exchange student, or a traveling Hawaiian in town on business. Of all the possibilities, why did he have to be black, especially in North Carolina, where everything was so loaded? I think Gretchen was feeling the same way—not that she needed to let this slide but that she was caught up in some tiresome cliché. Now here was her father organizing a posse.
The situation got weirder still when I noticed the baseball bat lying across the backseat of the car. This wasn’t something that had been brought from home—we’d no sooner own a baseball bat than a trident. Rather, it was brand-new and still had a price tag on it.
“You bought a baseball bat?”
“Calm down,” my father told me. “If we don’t catch the guy, maybe your brother can use it.”
“For what?” I said. “Since when does Paul care about baseball? On top of that, you don’t even know who we’re looking for.”
My father was hoping that Gretchen might identify her attacker through his body language—the way he walked or moved his hands. Likelier still, she could perhaps recognize his voice. This was possible, surely, and I could understand it if the field of potential suspects was narrowed down—a lineup of five behind mirrored glass, say. As it stood, every black male in Raleigh between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five was a possible candidate, especially those with long pants and white T-shirts on.
“This is ridiculous,” Gretchen moaned. Our father drove past the pancake house and turned onto Hillsborough Street, stopping soon after to point to a black man. “Does that one look familiar?” he asked.
The guy was perhaps in his early twenties and was holding a can of Coke to his mouth, a can he lowered when we pulled alongside him and my father stuck his head out the window. “Listen,” he said, “I need you to tell me how to get to the Capitol Building.”
The young man pointed in the direction we had come from and said that it wasn’t very far.
My father turned to Gretchen. “Is anything coming back to you?”
“Dad, please.”
Sensing something strange was happening, the young man stepped away from the car and continued down the street. “Hey,” my father called. “Hey, you!”
The next black man he stopped had a beat-up cast on his arm, and the one after that had an African accent and scars like whiskers on his face. Then Gretchen asked to be taken back to her apartment. She was waitressing that night, and my father insisted on driving her to work. Getting her home, he let me know, was my responsibility. “I still can’t believe you let her wander around by herself at three o’clock in the morning.”
One thing the adults all seemed to agree on was that Gretchen was remiss in walking to the grocery store. So remiss, according to some, that you couldn’t really blame the guy who attacked her, as what was he supposed to think, a young woman out on her own at that hour—a young woman in shorts, no less?
“But doesn’t the killing jar count for anything?” I argued. “Is it that hard to distinguish a prostitute from a college student? Whores don’t wear glasses. And what about me? I walk to the store all the time.”
The rules, of course, were different for women. When they were young, each of my sisters was approached by a stranger, someone in a car who’d pretend to be lost and needing directions. The girls would come up to the rolled-down window and see that the driver’s pants were unzipped, that his penis was hard, and that he was stroking it. It wasn’t the same guy every time—one might be bald and wearing sunglasses, while another could have long sideburns and a lazy eye—but it happened in turn to all the Sedaris girls. They’d see a man their father’s age masturbating, and afterward they’d wander into the house, never hysterical but slightly dazed, as if they’d been stopped by a talking cat.
I felt left out and remember asking my father why it never happened to me.
“Well, think about it,” he said. “Exposing yourself to a girl is one thing. Doing it to a boy, though—the guy would have to be perverted.”
Then there were the strangers who called the house. “You want to eat my what?” I once heard my mother say into the receiver. “Buddy, if that’s what you’re after, you are talking to the wrong lady.” Then she laughed, not cruelly but in a way that seemed genuine. Had she said, “Here, let me put my daughter on the phone,” it wouldn’t have surprised me.
There’d been something almost comic about the exhibitionists and crank callers, the sense that, more than anything, these men were to be pitied. Touching, though, that was something else. Then there was the racial divide. I don’t mean to suggest that my father was operating on a double standard—he’d have gone out looking for a white would-be rapist as well. I just don’t think he’d have felt so frustrated and out of his element.
The day after poring over mug shots, Gretchen had a class. I worked at the restaurant and came home to find my dad sitting on my front porch. It seemed that, with my sister or without her, he was determined to find the man who’d attacked her. It was beyond ridiculous at this point, but I think he knew that. Someone you love is assaulted by a stranger, and you can either sit at home and do nothing or drive around with an iced vodka and water tinkling between your legs, not just looking at other men but really looking at them, studying them, the way the students in the drawing class studied me. “Well, that’s something new,” my father said at one point, gesturing to a guy with a shower cap on his head.
It was rare for my dad and me to spend time alone, rarer still to be on the same team, and with a bat, no less. We both wanted to protect Gretchen, though neither of us was ultimately able to. After getting accepted to RISD, she moved to Providence and even learned to drive. She was in her car one night and had just pulled up in front of her apartment when a man yanked open the passenger door and jumped in beside her. “He was white,” she reported, “wearing jeans and a red plaid jacket.” Luckily she scared him off by laying on her horn. A few months later, following a long shift at the restaurant she worked at, she fell asleep and awoke to find three men standing around her bed. This was a case of her needing protection from herself, as it turned out they were firefighters. It seemed she’d gone to bed with a pan of popcorn on the stove and had slept through the kitchen full of smoke, the phone calls from her neighbors, and the concerted pounding on her door.
All that was in the future on the afternoon my father and I cruised around Raleigh, looking for potential rapists. For a while the two of us talked about Gretchen, imagining the worst that might have happened and stoking our anger. Then we talked about all my sisters and how much they needed us, or at least him. I was disappointed when my dad’s drink ran out and he headed back to drop me off at my apartment. I somehow hadn’t realized until that moment how much I dreaded the place, how freighted it was with the sense of failure. It seemed that I’d missed some pivotal step on the path to adulthood. My father went from high school to the navy to college to IBM, skipping from one to the next like they were stones in a river he was crossing. These wouldn’t have been my choices, surely, but you had to admire his single-mindedness. When I thought of my path, I recalled several quaaludes I’d taken a week earlier, pills that had somehow caused me to fall up the flight of stairs from my apartment to Gretchen’s. Was this what the rest of my life would be like? I wanted to say to my father, “Help me,” but what came out was “Do you think you could maybe loan me twenty dollars?”
“There is absolutely no chance of that happening,” he said.
“What about ten?”
It wasn’t long afterward that Gretchen got her acceptance letter. The news superseded her attack, and though she wouldn’t move for another three months, in a way it was like she’d already gone. The incident that had bound us together now felt like the end of something, a chapter that for her might be titled “The Life Before My Real Life Began.”
I missed the pizza after she’d left, but more than that I missed her, missed having someone naive enough to believe in me. When she returned she’d be just like the other friends who’d moved on, the ones who flew home for Christmas and made you feel like a loser. Not that they tried to. Sure, they’d mention their celebrity sightings, the art shows and opportunities in their exciting new cities, but always there would come that moment when their talk turned back to Raleigh and how much they supposedly missed it. “Because the people, my God,” they’d say. “And you can get such good spaces here—an apartment for, what do you pay, David, one fifty a month?”
A person needed savings in order to move, but more than that he needed gumption. The mink I’d returned that day in Washington would not have helped me get out of North Carolina. With the money I could have sold it for, I’d have undoubtedly stayed just where I was, living meagerly from week to week and inventing other excuses for myself. It did not escape my attention that while modeling for the drawing class I was both literally and figuratively standing still. It was a position I’d hold for another three years, a long time when you’re going nowhere, and an interminable one when you’re going nowhere fast.