A defeated woman, I moved into a furnished room in a seedy part of town, the only thing I could afford. My new circumstances were degrading after a lifetime of middle-class comforts, however they were what I felt I deserved. In the final analysis, my rape had eventually robbed me of all my rights and dignity.
At first I longed to see the kids, but letters I got from them changed that. Their messages brimmed with happiness. They were obviously easy prey for the goodies their father was heaping on them to win their loyalty. It wasn't long, of course, before the letters stopped and all contact ceased.
It would have been stupid of me to think I couldn't be replaced in the lives of my children. Ted and Gwen were both such attractive teens that they could find all the affection they needed, if you know what I mean.
Logically I knew that I should find a job, but it was so hard to get up off my butt and face the world. I was so down that I preferred to lie around in bed all day smoking cigarettes, drinking gin and tonics, and watching game shows on television.
Then Don started being late with his weekly support checks. When I complained to his lawyer, I was laughed at.
'If you don't like it,' the attorney sneered, 'hire your own legal representation and take my client to court for contempt.'
That was about like telling me to fly myself to the moon using my arms. Lawyers cost money, and I didn't have any. In other words, the only way I could force Don to live up to his legal responsibilities was for him to finance the litigation.
Then my landlord raised the rent. He, too, told me that if I had any complaints I should take them to court.
The handwriting was on the wall. However much it pained me to venture into the cruel glare of the outside world, I had to find a job.
My vocational problem was, needless to say, apparent. After years of being a wife and mother, I didn't know how to do anything.
My spirits sank so low that I even thought about prostitution as a career. After all, I did know how to fuck.
Then I remembered my one experience in that line of work. That sailor in the alley. In terms of getting any money, it had been a total flop. Given my ability to stand up to men for my rights, I could see myself getting VD or beaten to death long before I paid my bills.
It became clear that my only hope for a job was to be willing to volunteer for something nobody else wanted to do. Something most people would consider beneath them.
Well, how does cleaning up animal shit sound to you? Would you do it? I had to.
A veterinarian advertised in the paper that he needed somebody. After the ad appeared in the classifieds for several days running, I reasoned that the work was unpleasant enough that I might qualify for it.
For once I was right.
'It's really very simple,' Dr. Greer told me when he interviewed me. 'Your duties would consist of all the tasks relating to animal care that I certainly didn't have to go six years to the university to learn. Do you follow me?'
'Cleaning up after them, I suppose,' I figured it out. 'Taking the dogs for walks.'
'Precisely,' he said. 'No thinking involved – just simple maintenance work.'
Since my private life was one of isolation, to begin with, the animals I cleaned up after became my major contact with the world outside of my furnished room and the game shows. The fact that they liked me was just about the only source of satisfaction in my life.
Because I took them out for nightly exercise, it was the dogs I became closest to. There were always a lot of them in Greer's kennel. Pretty soon I started to relate to them almost as I would to people, except they were superior because they never criticized or betrayed me.
Since nobody was around, I would frequently read their charts. I came to worry about their various ailments, and although I was always sorry to see a friend leave, I was always glad they had recovered enough to go home.
Thor and Spike were different, however. The two Great Danes were not hospitalized because of anything wrong with them – in fact, quite the opposite.
They belonged to some lady living in the poshest part of town who complained that they were spoiling her furniture and carpets with their instinctively masculine habit of staking out their territory by pissing all over everything. Dr. Greer had advised her that this could be halted by having them neutered.
In other words, castrating them. Chopping off their balls. They were such magnificent beasts that it pained me to know they were about to be robbed of their masculinity.
Their operations were scheduled for a Thursday.
On the Wednesday evening before, I went to their cages as though to console them. I felt like a chaplain visiting a couple of prisoners on the eve of their execution.
CHAPTER TEN
I was broke. Down and out. Completely without self-respect.
In order to pay my rent, I was forced to sell my only contact with the outside world, my car. However, the few hundred dollars it brought only delayed my descent into the bottom of the barrel of life by a few meaningless weeks. By the time my wallet was empty again, I was even worse off than before.
Even before I lost the ear, looking for another job seemed out of the question. Who would ever hire someone who radiated uselessness the way I did?
Holed up in my room, and drinking more everyday, I even gave up the game shows I had habitually watched. The happy faces of the winners were too much for, me. It hardly seemed fair that other people could experience joy when my life was so utterly lacking in it.
Day after day I stayed in bed, getting drunk, staring at the wallpaper and counting the repetition of its rosy design. My mind was saturated with unpleasantness and depression.
Of course, the more I thought about my plight, the more it all came back to that fateful night the car had broken down after the PTA meeting. The rape.
The rape was the beginning of all my bad luck. The opening door to the ruination of my life. My degradation as a woman.
Before the rape, my life had been peaceful and happy. There were no peak moments of exhilaration, but, on the other hand, no spirit-sapping lows either. Just an even keel that a person of my middle-class background was conditioned to expect.
Considering its pivotal position in my life, I was condemned to mentally re-live the rape over and over again. And, needless to say, the same issue came up repeatedly.
I had not resisted.
Don's lawyer had been right – I had let the rapist fuck me.
This was the key. And it went even beyond such elementary guilt. Even in his brutal accusations, the attorney still had not gotten to the truth that only I knew.
I had come.
Not once, but several times. What's more, I had actually begged for more.
Then there'd been those two cops who'd found me in the street with my throbbing crotch leaking all over the pavement. Not only had they assumed I was an easy piece of ass, I'd performed like one.
Then, of course, after the night of the rape I'd gone wild.
Having lesbian sex with the Avon lady, screwing my psychiatrist, whoring in an alley with a sailor, making love with my children.
Needless to say, this was not the Mary Randall who'd previously devoted her life to being a respectable wife and mother and upholding middle-class values. No, this was a degraded woman. A tramp. Damaged goods.
It was no longer surprising to me that my husband had filed for divorce. After all, when spoilage develops, you have to cut it away to protect the rest of the organism. He had to get rid of me to save the family.
