SOMETIMES I FELT that growing up and being a girl was about learning to be afraid. Not paranoid, exactly, but always alert and aware, like checking out the exits in the movie theater or the fire escape in a hotel. You came to know, in a way you hadn’t as a kid, that the body you inhabited was vulnerable, imperfectly fortified. On TV, in the papers, in books and movies, it isn’t ever men being raped or kidnapped or bludgeoned or dismembered or burned with acid. But in stories and crime shows and TV series and movies and in life too, it’s going on all the time, all around you. So you learn, in your mind, that your body needs to be protected. It’s both precious and totally dispensable, depending on whom you encounter. You don’t want to end up at a party not knowing how to get home. You don’t want to end up walking down a street—especially a quiet street—by yourself at night. You don’t want to open your door to a strange man at all, really, ever, if you’re alone, even if he’s wearing a uniform. Because his uniform could be a disguise. It happens. I’ve seen it on TV.
You start to grow up and you learn from all the stories around you what the world is like, and you start to lose freedoms. Not because anybody actually tells you that you’ve lost them, but because you know you need to take care. Without a friend beside you, no biking on the Audubon Trail, no swimming at the quarry, no hiking in the woods. Beware darkness, isolation, the outdoors, unlocked windows, men you don’t know. And then you realize too that even men you know, or thought you knew, might not be okay.
A math teacher that fall at a high school in nearby New Hampshire was caught in an FBI sting with thousands of kiddie-porn images on his computer—pictures of little girls kept in cages, someone said. A rabbi in Boston was caught spying on the women of his congregation in their ritual baths. The guy who owned the diner we’d sometimes gone to on our way back from the beach, less than half an hour from our house, was accused of sexually harassing his waitresses and forcing one—or was it three? Or five? They kept coming out of the woodwork; it had gone on for years, apparently—to have sex with him. So when I remembered the harried woman in tight mom jeans who’d served us the last time—memorable for a strawberry birthmark the size of a gumball on her right cheek, and for the fact that, with her heavily outlined china-blue eyes, she was otherwise notably pretty, or had been, until life had ground her down and worn her out prematurely, furrowing her skin—I remembered her and wondered if she was one of them, if she’d been forced onto her knees in the pantry after hours, or whether the birthmark had spared her, like what Cassie had told me about the sign from God at Passover, whether her flaw had proven her blessed protection.
You get to middle school, and you think about these things. The world opens up; history stretches behind you, and the future stretches before you, and you’re suddenly aware of the wild, unknowable interior lives of everyone around you, the realization that each and every person lives in an unspoken world as full and strange as your own, and that you can’t ever hope entirely to know anything, not even yourself.
But just as the world is opening up, it’s closing too, and things reveal their previously unimagined shapes. Without it being said, I was treated as a kid with a bright future and Cassie, well, she wasn’t necessarily not going to have one, but her path would be different from mine. Without anybody saying so outright, I was being told that my path was the more valuable. I got that from my parents, and from Mr. Cartwright when he chose me for speech team, and from my teachers when they patted me on the back and gave me good grades, and from my grandmother, who, when she asked me about Cassie at Thanksgiving and I told her we’d been drifting apart, caressed my cheek with her shiny hand that smelled of rosewater and said, “It’s hard growing up, because each of us must follow our own star”—which was, of itself, pretty neutral, but then she added, “And some of us have brighter stars to follow than others, I’m afraid.”
And if we were growing up, and growing up differently now, and if there was some faintly ominous sense about the adolescence and adulthood that lay before us—as if there’d inevitably be a cull along the way, and drugs, or violence, or car crashes or general misfortune, or, for the girls, the folly of careless sex or the evils of predatory men who lurked, unidentifiable as guerilla fighters, among us—then the unspoken cry that echoed from all sides was “Save yourself!” because it was clear that it was the only thing you could hope to do, and even that might be impossible.
You couldn’t possibly try to save someone else first. Like the safety demonstration on the airplane, when they tell you to put on your own oxygen mask first. That’s what matters. You can’t help anyone if you don’t help yourself.
Cassie wasn’t herself thinking about any of these things, as far as I know. Not then or later. It was a preoccupying riff in my own head. My mother made me stop watching crime programs on TV, and when the girl in New Hampshire, a couple of years older than Cassie and me, vanished on her way home from school, my mother stopped leaving the local paper around and turned off the news if the story came on. Around the same time, there was the young woman at college in Portland whose body was never found: they figured out that a guy she knew from her job had invited her home to hang out with him and his girlfriend, and then they’d killed her and thrown her body into the ocean. You had to wonder why they’d done it. Just because they could? And you had to wonder about that girlfriend. What was going on in her head? What kind of person was she?
“The depravity!” my mother ranted. “It’s a self-perpetuating cycle in a sick society.” And then: “As a feminist, I’ve got to find a way for us to address this.”
“Us?”
“You and me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I wish this wasn’t the world,” she said. “Part of me wants to protect you from hearing it . . . but this is the world.” She shrugged. “So we have to find some way to address it.”
Whether because of the facts, or the culture, or my mother’s anger about it, or simply my cowardly temperament, the only result was that I was scared, some type of low-level scared all the time—in the back of my mind, but always there.
Cassie wasn’t, or she wasn’t letting on. If I was melting into a state of near-constant anxiety, my body creating palpitations and tremors out of innocuous sounds, then Cassie was hardening, small, tight, unsparing, even her laugh turned brittle, and her little girl’s body seemed at once unfinished and withering on the vine. She told me some stuff when we were together, but always as if it were a joke, a black joke. I figured it was how she got by.