Support Group

The St. Catherine’s Community Center Rape Survivors Support Group meets every Tuesday from six until nine in the evening. It is a highlight every seven days, each session a series of bright moments to interrupt the tedium of the group’s quotidian suffering. They originally met on Thursdays but the members found they needed to meet earlier in the week to actually make it through the week. Three hours of group was rarely enough. Most members also saw the facilitator, a sedate older woman named Linda, two or three times a week outside of group. They sat in her office, decorated with warm hues and house plants, and spoke in thin voices, held warm mugs of tea with trembling hands and counted the seconds, minutes, hours until the next group session.

There was little affection among the women and occasional man. They had no reason to like each other, and sometimes they just plain hated each other because every time they looked around the circle of broken people they saw the worst parts of themselves. The group’s ambivalence was also reinforced by a rigid hierarchy — women who had been raped by family members at the top of the trauma food chain followed by women who fell victim to stranger danger and finally those who were unlucky enough to have been forced into a non-consensual sexual situation by a close friend or acquaintance — the ones who asked for it.

Nora Daniels and Nina Moscone were best friends, met through the group. They were both violated by their fathers, happy drunks who didn’t really understand parent child relationships, and they spent most of their free time in Nina’s living room sipping Irish Cream laced with coffee, recounting each horrifying detail of their childhoods until their throats dried and their chests burned with the euphoria of constant confession. During group meetings they easily usurped Linda’s authority, leaving the facilitator to sit in a corner knitting tiny scarves for her extensive stuffed animal collection. Linda silently judged the victims—that’s what she called the women, not survivors as they were so fond of saying. She liked to say the word with a long hiss. She hated the group, how their hands were always shaking, their lower lips quivering, how their eyes were always watering and how they picked at their scabbed wounds, digging straight to the silver glint of their bones no matter how much time and distance had passed between the difficult now and terrible then.

The meeting was always called to order promptly at six and began with announcements about new members, departing members, new books of interest and who was responsible for the next week’s snacks, a task the group shared with the exception of Emily Fournier who simply could not cook or make an appropriate snack purchase to save her life, and instead provided the group with facial tissues purchased at a local warehouse supply store. The problem was, she bought industrial off-brand tissue meant for office buildings where crying was largely frowned upon and further discouraged through an endless supply of thin, rough tissue. In the support group, crying was like breathing, so many of the women would shuffle to their cars after a particularly teary session, their faces rubbed raw, the lingering tears sending tiny fissures of discomfort through their cheekbones.

Some weeks as many as twenty women attended group, and other weeks the group was more sparsely populated by the eleven hardcore-victim survivors who needed the three hours of traumatic testimony to sustain their spirits. With regular business out of the way, Nora and Nina, but mostly Nina, asked if anyone needed to share, always over pronouncing the word need and deliberately avoiding the word want because really, the duo felt, no one wanted to be in the poorly lit room in the community center, sitting in the hard plastic chairs that refused to yield to their bodies. New members would tell their stories and women who had been in the group longer would re-open old wounds or detail fresh injustices and indignities.

Ellie, the youngest member of the group at seventeen, spent most of her time cutting paper dolls from brightly colored construction paper. The other women thought it odd but didn’t want to intervene because the girl was so precise, so intent in her work. No one quite knew her story. She came to meetings and brought Rice Krispie treats covered in rainbow sprinkles when it was her turn to provide the group snack. She listened intently when other women shared, but when Nora and Nina asked Ellie if she had anything to say Ellie always shook her head and offered a faint smile. Between sessions, many of the hardcore eleven would call each other and speculate as to the nature and severity of the unfortunate circumstance predicating the young girl’s participation in the group. Given her tender age, many were concerned she might still be living in a troubled environment, but, when asked, Ellie offered that she lived alone in an apartment near her high school as an emancipated minor. She brought her paper dolls home every Tuesday night and pasted them to the walls with glue sticks. She lay on the floor and stared at the perfect girls of pink and blue and green and red. She loved how they were all exactly the same even when they looked a little different.

Roz Roberts Raynor was a controversial presence — the group called her a troublemaker, worried that maybe she was a little crazy. She married her rapist, a stranger who accosted her in the lower levels of a raucous football stadium during the State Championship game three years earlier. “He ruined me for every other man,” Roz told the group during her third meeting. After the incident, for that’s how they all referred to the unfortunate circumstances bringing them together, Roz went to the police, endured the indignity of medical intervention necessary to process the evidence of her violation. She told the police about the deep dimple in her rapist’s chin and the tiny scar beneath his left eye. His hair was a light brown, a little longer than it should be, shagging over his ears and neck. He was tall and lanky, not at all muscular. His strength surprised her. When the police found him, one Charles Raynor, Roz stood behind the one-way mirror staring at her reflection until the lineup was brought in. She couldn’t look herself in the eyes. Or she wouldn’t. She wasn’t sure.

She recognized him instantly but played it cool. Roz shook her head as each man stepped forward, said, “I’m going to score with you, baby.” Even though she was flanked by two beefy detectives, Roz clenched her fingers in tight, sweaty fists. She could smell Raynor through the cinder and glass, through the men around her and the stench of their cologne and cheap suits. The prosecutor and detectives could barely hide their frustration. “Are you sure you don’t see your attacker?” they asked, their voices rising higher and higher. Roz felt like she was in a Law & Order episode only with less attractive people. She quietly excused herself and waited outside the police station for Raynor to be released. He walked out slowly, shoulders hunched, hands shoved deep in his pockets. She began walking alongside him and after a few steps, hooked her arm through his. He looked at her and startled, his face flushing a bright red. She said, “Don’t say anything.” She said, “You’re going to marry me.” Charles Raynor remembered Roz well, how she struggled, how she smelled like peaches and popcorn and Pabst, how the roar of the crowd in the football stadium had dampened the pitch of her screams, how when he fucked his girlfriend, he thought of the skinny redhead he had taken to the beat of a marching band.

After the meeting where Roz revealed her husband’s true nature, the rest of the group hovered near the entrance of the community center in a tight circle, smoking cigarettes angrily and speaking in clipped tones. They expressed their outrage and indignation. Nina suggested Roz might not belong in the group. Later though, when they were in their own homes, behind locked doors with chairs propped beneath doorknobs, every single woman thought Roz’s logic made perfect sense. The truth of that tasted bitter on their tongues.

Sometimes, a woman dared to confess the feeling that she was moving on. Penelope Prentiss was notorious for such transgression. After two years in the group, she began talking about dating and enjoying the occasional flirtation with a man in a bar. Sometimes, she even made out with guys, guys she didn’t know and she didn’t feel a damn thing about it. After one such utterance Nora pursed her lips and Nina shook her head slowly. Nina said, “Isn’t that what got you into trouble in the first place?” Penelope blushed furiously, tried to find the right words to convey her shame tempered with the right amount of indignation at the assertion, in this, of all places, that she had gotten what she deserved. Instead, she bit her tongue until she tasted blood. She understood the rules, understood that as the girl who was raped by her college roommate’s boyfriend, her opinion didn’t matter so much. The next meeting, she was bolder despite the previous week’s sanction. She told the women about her date with a man, he worked at a copy shop and his fingers smelled like hot ink. Penelope said he knew exactly how to push her buttons and after dinner at a Mexican restaurant where they ate spicy food and drank cold margaritas on the rocks in heavily salted glasses, they went back to his place, and stumbled drunkenly into his apartment and fell in a tangle of limbs on his living room floor. She told the group how the copy man quickly undressed her and pinned her down and for a moment, she felt a terrible panic just below her breastbone and then, that panic began to spread through her body and it started to feel kind of warm and good and she decided for the first time in two years to stop thinking so goddamned much. It turned her on, she said, to fuck this guy she barely knew on his living room floor. She woke up in his bed and had no regrets. In fact, she said quietly, she felt like singing. When Penelope was done sharing, the room was quiet save for the occasional gurgle of the coffee maker. Every woman sat on the edge of her seat, including Nora and Nina. Nora cleared her throat after several awkward, silent moments. She crossed her legs primly, resting her hands on her knee. “I think that’s enough for one evening,” she said. That was the last anyone heard from Penelope Prentiss.

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Roxane Gay’s writing appears or is forthcoming in the Mid-American Review, Annalemma, Diagram, Monkeybicycle, Hobart, McSweeney’s (online), Gargoyle and others. She is the co-editor of PANK and is online at http://www.roxanegay.com.