THE BARMAID RECALLS . . .

THE BARMAID RECALLS HER FIRST


for twenty years she's wondered how he felt.
She felt confused and hurt and guilty, scared
of pregnancy, afraid that he'd come back again,
afraid he'd never want to see her face again.
It took ten years to know the word was "rape."
And still she cries at night, without quite knowing why. 
And still she keeps the light on when she loves, or tries.
Sometimes she cries to think how proud she felt
to seem grown up, to ride beside a boy -- her sister's friend --
already old enough to drive; to let his dancing eyes
draw laughter from her timid heart. 

Perhaps he felt as mortified as her kid brother did,
at seven, when his arrow killed a bird.  He'd aimed
at it; but then he held its lifeless body in his hands
and cried.  She doesn't think that Larry cried
-- or even knew he'd killed anything.  He didn't feel
the pain between her legs or how her head still throbbed
from banging on car door and seat.  He didn't see
her cry -- she steeled herself -- but must have seen
she sat all huddled up and couldn't speak.  Was he scared
of her father or the cops?  She never told
-- how could she tell, and have them look at her that way?
What would her parents do? She showered silently. 
She sees him swaggering among his friends, she hears
the jokes he must have made.  By now he's long forgotten her.

He goes to work each day somewhere, and sleeps
at night beside his wife.  He disciplines
his children, tries to raise them right.





Current events made me pull out this poem.  I'd written it years ago, and made only minor revisions, then took it to poetry workshop Thursday evening.

I was working on a column and thinking about how often I've seen "minor" episodes a man might reasonably have forgotten can wreak havoc with the victim's life and psyche for the rest of her life, despite therapy.  Of course, the episode described in the poem was not in the least minor.  "Larry" succeeded in doing what Brett fumbled around trying to do.  That doesn't make Brett any more virtuous or considerate than Larry.

The barmaid was a real person I knew pretty well.  She'd been raped when she was 14.  Boy just came to the house to see her sister, and when the sister was out he invited the younger girl to go for a ride -- and raped her.  I was pretty moved by what she told me, and how I knew it had affected her, and wrote the poem, using many details from her story but omitting some and adding some.  (For example, the kid brother shooting an arrow at the bird was something I did, over at a friend's house, at some young age.)  It doesn't quite feel like my poem; and reading it saddens me.

Around then, she decided to do a performance piece or an art installation about the event, which (amazingly, perhaps) had occurred in a Volkswagen beetle.  I had a VW,  She borrowed the back seat from mine to put in the gallery as part of the piece.

Anyway, she was still strongly feeling the impact of the moment after twenty years, while he had probably pushed it far to the back of his mind.  That dissonance helped move me to write the poem, and I recalled it when reading about Mr. Kavanaugh and Ms. Ford.

Someone suggested I delete "Her First" from the title.  Although I meant it as "first sexual experience," it could be read as "first rape," which I hadn't intended, or as "first lover" which the rapist was obviously not.  I'm still thinking about that, but she's probably right. It was not a sexual experience but an act of violence.