Up in Michigan

It all started with Hemingway. Scratch that. It all started 17 years prior with a handful of lies and one night of no after no after no after no into tears into silence. It hadn’t started with Hemingway at all; he just broke it wide open.

We left on a Saturday morning with a loose agenda and high hopes. My girlfriends and I stuffed ourselves and our strong feminist leanings into an SUV and headed north. It feels good to head north. We were Hemingway hunting. Michigan natives, we had the good fortune of easy access to the upper reaches of the Lower Peninsula where the rolling hills and pine forests bleed into the cool of a Great Lake, a place that gives space to dreams and fears and harsh realities, a Hemingway haunt.

Our little Book Club had read “The Paris Wife” in the fall and by spring we were feeling antsy and in need of a quick getaway. The book was a fictionalized account of Hemingway’s relationship with his first wife and its subsequent demise. It reminded me of my twenties, racing around Europe, chasing my own demons, demons that the book had an eerie way of bringing to the surface again.

We found a cozy cottage on Walloon Lake and packed our coolers and a box full of wine for a solitary night of freedom, many of us being moms to small children back home. We’d lined up a few of his shorts to set the mood and prep everyone for an evening of thoughtful conversation.

I didn’t realize the search for Hemingway would turn up a long-buried story of my own, one I had taken liberties with for years and by the end of the evening would finally see in its truist form.

The story of those moments – years, nearly decades prior – had been colored over, tainted by layers of rationalizations and comparisons to other people’s stories which had changed my view of my own. It all came crashing down into an uncomfortable pile of rubble on an old oak table in that outdated cabin, surrounded by women – friends – who I instantly felt miles away from. Embarrassed. Ashamed. Alone.

For years, I thought I had been telling the truth.

“I was in the wrong place with the wrong person.”

“It was just a bad situation.”

“It was not what I would call consensual.”

“It’s an ugly story.”

It was an ugly story, but stories are evasive. A story, as we are raised to understand it, evokes fabrication, falsehood, exaggeration. Our stories, over time, shift and change – not because they are less true, but because we grow in our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Our understanding of our story, our truth, changes. Sometimes, the waters get murkier. Sometimes, they clear.

We had read a selection of Hemingway’s shorts, stark accounts of lives shaped in the wilderness. We read, “Indian Camp” and “Two-Hearted River” but the one that changed everything, the one that slipped through my fingers and landed in my lap was “Up in Michigan.” It revealed a moment experienced – maybe not experienced, maybe inflicted upon – a young woman, but I guess that’s all up to who is sitting there mouthing the words, flipping the pages, underlining the passages, feeling their own story retold through strangers in the woods.

After wandering around Petoskey, after sipping cocktails at a bar known to serve the legendary author once up a time, after indulging in glasses of dark red wine and hours of light conversation, we gathered at the table to discuss the book. “Indian Camp” took time as did a few others, and then we reached “Up in Michigan,” the one I had been waiting for.

I had thought it would spur a lively debate, but no. There was a clear understanding of what this story was about – by everyone but me. Not one to avoid dissension, I posed a question.

“It was obviously a bad situation, but would we call it rape? Did she ever actually say ‘no?'”

Everyone jumped to answer.

“Yes!”

“She most definitely did.”

“Oh my gosh! Of course, she did.”

Someone thumbed through their copy of the paperback collection and read aloud, “You mustn’t, Jim. You mustn’t. Neither Jim nor Jim’s big hand paid any attention to her.”

The blood raced up my neck. My cheeks flamed hot. How had I missed this? I’d read the story over and over in anticipation of the trip. It was just a few pages, and yet, I had somehow skipped the very meat of the sadness, the ugliest corner of the story. But I hadn’t missed it. I had read it and bled it into my own.

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A picture of rape was presented to me at five or six. I was pretending to sleep on the couch while a soap opera played across a tiny living room. There was a commotion on screen, and I peeked through squinting eyes to see screaming, hitting, a woman knocked to the floor, held there. I saw kissing and crying, a hand forced over a shouting mouth. This would become my definition of rape, one that would always come back to me, regardless of how many stories I heard or saw or read or felt. This was not what my story looked like, sounded like.

Mine was not a violent rape, so mine, to me, was not a rape at all. The scene was quiet, nearly silent, a malevolent spirit entering the room, switching places with that 19-year-old boy…man? So, in my mind and life story just starting to take shape, it was something else – shameful, humiliating, regrettable – nothing more.

There was no screaming. No hitting. No shoving onto the floor. He didn’t cover my mouth to muffle shouts. There were none. Just whispered “no’s” and soundless tears dutifully finding their way from my face to the pillowcase where they would soak into the cool of the fabric and lay dormant, unseen traces of my presence left in that room until his father, or more likely, a housekeeper, would strip the sheets that held my story, toss them into a washer and return to the dishes.

I laid there in the dark as he slept soundly by my side, and I wondered about his mother. She had been erased from their family, as he so proudly showed me in the framed photograph in his room, a black hole where the head of his mother used to be.

His father was home that night as was his little sister. Did he have one or two? I can’t recall; I can only remember that scissor-cut black hole within the silver frame, that black hole and his smiling little boy face right beneath, that little boy face that became the same one looming above me, smiling down, the flash of teeth mirroring the ones in the photo. How is it that grinning little boys grow into our inner demons?

The plan had been to stay as a group, but when we left the club and piled into cars, there was a reshuffling of bodies. My girlfriend jumped in with me but was quickly escorted out of the car and put into another vehicle. Suddenly, there was no room at the apartment. He and I would have to go back to his father’s house where he snuck me in through a back door, so maybe we were never there at all.

It felt orchestrated. I sensed it but went along, believing I was strong enough to fend off the weight of a young man’s entitlement. It was my 18th birthday, and I flexed my new adulthood, sneaking drinks and dancing in a mob of strangers, then slipping off to a dark bedroom. I wore a short, tight dress with black vinyl lip prints. A girl in wolf’s clothing. Or maybe a lamb. Again, it depends who’s telling the story.

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“Liz took off her coat and leaned over and covered him with it. She tucked it around him neatly and carefully,” Hemingway’s account of the aftermath.

I had done the same. Not in the hours that followed as I lay awake staring into nothing, wrapped in shame and a gray comforter. But in the few days that followed, before we returned home, I tried desperately to right the wrong. I needed a connection, a relationship – a real one – to justify what had taken place. To make it better. To give it purpose. To erase the ugliness and turn it into…what exactly?

But, of course, I could not undo what had been done in those few minutes of quiet resignation. Defeat? Violation? Assault? If it isn’t consensual and it isn’t rape, what exactly is it? What is the right word for a girl who’s just been shown her voice is nothing but a suggestion?

If a woman says “no” in the middle of the night, in a stranger’s house 900 miles from home, does she make a sound? If she says it once or ten times? If she says it until she is told to be quiet because she has lost control and this will happen? Does she want to wake the whole house? Does she want to be found out? Does she make a sound as she falls?

My story suggests she does not. She falls in that forest alone. Nobody hears, so it has not happened. She cries into the soil and as quickly as the tears hit ground they are washed away by rain, so there is no proof, just shallow roots and a strong breeze she should have seen coming.

She will lay down, motionless in that forest for years, hiding her face in the moss and dirt until she can’t remember if she fell or was cut down. Was that a windstorm or an ax? She can’t recall, but there is a wound in her side and traces of blood, and surely the wind couldn’t have caused all that damage.

So years later, when her friends sit around an old oak table and ascertain that poor Liz was, most definitely, without a doubt, forced against her will, against her pleading voice, into something she did not want, that poor Liz in all her pitiful quietness was indeed raped – that 18-year-old birthday girl turned 34-year-old blazing feminist mother of three, that girl so full of shame and rage, will lay quiet still, praying the northern moon won’t illuminate her scars, the weight of a word stuck on her tongue.

– Ashley, Woman of a Certain Rage