Susan Thornton
USDA Prime
I was fifteen that summer, 1965, and Warren was telling stories on the porch at the summer place. I regarded Warren as a chosen big brother. I was an only child and he the son of my mom’s best friend. At 24 he had lived on his own for a long time, most recently as a manger of a night club in Chicago. He looked around to make sure his mother was out of earshot, and then continued his discussion of a friend’s girlfriend. “And she had a tattoo across her ass, in big bold letters: USDA Prime. And boy, was she prime!”
We all laughed, including my cousin Janie. I wondered: Would I ever be considered “prime”?
At fifteen I was five foot three inches tall, weighed 116 and considered myself fat. In photos I am a knockout, but at the time I didn’t know that.
The previous winter I was dry-humped by a very drunk boy in the back seat of a car, both of us fully clothed, and at the time I thought, almost clinically, well, when I get around to having sex this is what it must feel like, but without the clothes in the way.
By the following summer I had got rid of my virginity with a college boy who, not finding anything else to critique, tells me “the skin of your upper eye lid is too dry. You should do something about that.” A memorable exchange: I mention, idly, that I would like one day to live in New York City. His response is immediate and scornful. “You’ll live where your husband lives.” In my heart I resolve not to marry. That will solve that problem.
Winter 1968. I have a steady boyfriend at college. I go to my doctor to ask about the brand-new birth control pill. “I won’t prescribe it,” he says. “Too dangerous. You will get blood clots in your legs and die. But I do want to check your breasts for cancer.” I lie on the table and he spends a longtime stroking, pressing, fondling my breasts. He is visibly excited. The nurse on the other side of the room, who is present as a matter of course, keeps her face unreadable. After the “checkup” is over, we meet in his office and he revisits the birth control question. “If you skip your period and find you are nauseous, don’t call me.” He dismisses me without another glance.
I persist in my pursuit of the pill, put a ring on my left hand, and make an appointment at a clinic using “Mrs.” for my title. The examining doctor insists on a pelvic exam, gets me on the table and in the stirrups and calls in four medical students, all men. He has seen through my ruse and takes the opportunity to teach us all a little lesson. The young men examine me closely and with interest. The doctor highlights part of my anatomy: “And this is where the hymen WAS.” At last I obtain the coveted piece of paper, but I know I have paid in more than money.
Summer 1969. I am living in Cambridge and working in Boston. As I walk down a crowded street a boy walking toward me reaches out his hand. With one quick motion he squeezes my right breast, says: “Feels good!” and strolls on with the crowd. I am so startled I just keep walking.
Summer 1970. I am camping on the beach in Northern California with my boyfriend and some other college friends. At the little general store in Mendocino I strike up a conversation with a local resident: a man who admits proudly he is well into his 80s. We talk for a long time and when I stand up to leave, he stands up too, grabs me, forces his mouth to mine, his tongue into my mouth, my hand to his erect penis and pulls away only long enough to say, “You made it hard!” The tears in his eyes do nothing to slow my departure. When I tell my boyfriend what happened, he laughs. “You should have gone ahead. Think what a story it would have made.”
Summer 1973. I am in a car with a different boyfriend. We are both drunk and have been asked to leave the bar we were frequenting in downtown Boulder. In the alley behind the bar Steve breaks a beer bottle and threatens the bouncer who says he will call the police. Steve drives us home in my car, parks in the driveway of my apartment and I came to in the passenger seat with him on top of me.
It is fifteen years before I can admit this is rape.
Steve was a student in law school, a member of a well-connected local family, a recent graduate of a prestigious east coast college (as was I). I was the outsider, a girl from New York with no local family, no local legal connections. Even if I had admitted what had happened, at that time I knew only too well that young women who brought charges of rape were considered guilty. Defense attorneys hired detectives, dug up past sexual history, quizzed women on what they were wearing, and nine times of out nine, it seemed to me, only succeeded in victimizing the victim over and over. I didn’t want any part of that.
Summer 1977. I am hiking alone in Newfoundland and I’m lost. I stop at an isolated farm house to get directions back to the town where my friends are with the sailing ship on which I am spending the summer. There are a man and a woman living in the farm house. The man says, “I will show you the way along the path.” I thank him and we leave together. Once out of sight of the house he grabs me in a tight embrace. His fingers press into my upper arm. He begins to breathe hard into my ear and tell me what he is going to do to me.
As he does this I remember a story my friend Sheila told me. She was a student at Syracuse University and was surrounded in an alley outside a bar by three men. One threatened her with a knife; they had got as far as removing her underwear. “I’m a person too,” she kept saying “I’m a person too.”
“Is that what made them stop?”
Sheila held out her hand. “Do you know what happens if you have a mouse in your hand and it gets frightened?”
“Yeah,”’ I said, “It pees.”
“That’s what happened to me. I couldn’t help it. They had my underwear, there was the guy with the knife, there were three of them. I peed. They backed off and I got away.”
As the Canadian breathes in my ear I steel myself and repeat, “You can’t do this to me. I’m a person too. You can’t do this to me. I’m a person too.”
At last he lets me go. I know that I am very lucky.
Another friend was victimized by her dentist. As he tightened her braces to the point where she wept with the pain, he touched her sexually. The office staff, the hygienists, knew something was wrong but did nothing. At last she told her father, who bolted out of the house in a rage; the dentist disappeared and was never heard of again. My friend’s father never mentioned the incident, nor did she. For years she assumed her father had murdered the man and got away with it.
Summer 1982. I am living with a famous novelist who is a heavy drinker. One night he has had a few too many and our evening guest, who also has a snootful but who wants out of this chaotic scene and to go home, has driven his car into the ditch near the house. John wants to get our car, hitch it to Jeff’s car with a length of chain, pull him out of the ditch. They are both so drunk I am afraid someone will die. I have the car keys in my hand. John forces me to my knees, then punches me in the arm to make me give them up. I am pregnant with his baby when this happens. Every nerve in my body tells me I should run, but I stay with him. Two weeks later I miscarry the baby and nine weeks after that John dies in a motorcycle accident because he is still drunk from the night before.
But I stay with him. And I mourn him.
Winter 1986. I am a Ph.D. candidate at the university where my abusive alcoholic boyfriend taught. It would be pretty to say I stopped drinking because of his death but the opposite is true; I continue drinking, maybe I drink more. One night there is a house party. I stay too long and drink too much and come to out of an alcoholic fog to find my thesis advisor on top of me with his hand busy in my crotch, saying, “I’m only trying to find out if you are good enough.”
My solution: First, I immediately switch advisors to the only tenured woman in the department. (I am after all really focused on getting that Ph.D.) Second, I avoid Professor Toxic in the halls, and third, I write a short story about it, changing only the names. I show the story to another grad student. “If you publish this, this guy will find you, wherever you are living, and set fire to your bed while you are in it.”
I never submit the story for publication.
Spring 1987. I am engaged to be married. My fiancé is loyal, devoted, funny and a good human being. I am alone in his family’s kitchen. Gerry’s uncle comes into the room, approaches me and puts both hands on my breasts. His back is to the rest of the family, gathered in the living room, looking at TV. He squeezes, looking directly into my eyes. That look is terrible. It says: “I can do this whenever I want and you will say nothing.”
It must be the look on his face, because this time I decide to say something.
I immediately tell Gerry. “That old goat,” he says.
I tell my future father-in-law. He looks alarmed. “Don’t tell Katie,” he commands. Katie is my future mother-in-law.
OK. So I say something that time. I don’t deny what happened, change my patterns, write a short story. But what do I get?
Do I get: “Oh, Susan I am so sorry.” “That is terrible.” “Joe will no longer be welcome in our home”?
I don’t get it. What’s worse, I don’t really expect it. By this point I know the drill: shut up, repress, repeat; shut up, repress, repeat.
Autumn 1988. I am an assistant professor of English at a Jesuit college in central New York. My office is at the end of the hall. As I walk to my office, the other English professors on that corridor (all men) stand on either side of the corridor and trade dirty jokes and dirtier literary allusions over my head. Jokes like: A man admires a girl’s fur coat. She says, many animals died so I could have this coat. His riposte: Isn’t the question How many animals did you have to sleep with to get this coat? To a colleague who recently gave birth to a 9-pound baby: “So that is why you looked so ridiculous.” Of an adjunct faculty member who edits a poetry journal for her students’ work: “She couldn’t run a used pair of panty hose.”
At a department meeting a senior colleague turns his back to the only woman present, and to make a point, drops his trousers. When she objects he says: “You couldn’t see anything; I was wearing my running shorts.”
In honor of my Ph.D. and my new job, my mother has gifted me with an outrageously expensive desk edition of a Merriam Webster Dictionary. I am standing at my desk, looking up a word in this wonderful book which makes me so happy, when a male colleague stops at my office door long enough to look me up and down and to say: “Just what kind of pretentious bitch do you think you are, anyway?”
I don’t share this anecdote with my mom when she asks how I like my new job.
Only now, years later, do I realize it had nothing to do with the dictionary. He had caught me alone and was telling me how it was and what my place should be.
Autumn 2017. Every time I open my internet feed there is another story of a prominent man in the media who has lost his job because of improper touching many years before.
For me this awakens painful memories. Freud was right. You forget and then you forget that you forgot. Until, maybe, you see news coverage of someone like your abuser. Then, maybe, it is safe to remember.
I mention my discomfort to a colleague and call to mind only two instances of molestation and the one rape. I had never counted them up before. Then I remember more. And more. Another incident: my father’s friend, who was ten years older than my dad, came onto me when I was 18 and kept offering me better and better summer jobs at his organization which was so prominent in the city where we lived. My parents were mystified that I refused him and I could not tell them the truth, that accepting the job meant servicing a man in his seventies. I felt I had to protect them from their friend’s ugliness.
Oh, I was such a hero.
A wounded warrior.
No wonder I read and reread my Wonder Woman comics until they were falling apart.
Now there was a hero. Those golden bracelets that repelled bullets as she cleverly positioned her wrists. That sexy costume. That invisible airplane.
How I wish I had that lasso of truth which ensnared so many bad guys who now had to hear the truth about themselves.
I’m angry about these things that have happened. For years I repressed the memories and the anger. I feel more a survivor than a victim, as if some essential part of me was not touched by these incidents. Or maybe I am just pretending to think so. I also know there are many women who experience now, and who have survived, much much worse.
And yet, now that I am widowed, I still crave masculine attention. I still hope for a positive outcome in this fraught power struggle of men and women. Three of my assaults involved alcohol abuse. Now that I no longer drink perhaps a positive connection is possible. Hope showed up most recently with a man I met through friends. We talked, shared meals, talked more; we were obviously mutually attracted. I was obligated to leave but reluctant. As we parted at my car he asked: “Can I have a kiss?” “Yes,” I said, and he kissed me with such careful, friendly attention that a depth charge went off in my heart.
I came of age in a toxic time. I’ve been molested, abused, raped. Yet I’m still open to human connection, specifically connection with men. Does this make me a fool for love?
My daughter, age 24 and a knockout redhead, walks to work. She tells me how often she is catcalled, panhandled, bothered. As we speak I remember an incident from last winter. I was wearing a heavy coat and a hat. I was crossing the parking lot of our local supermarket and a man my own age was walking toward me. He had curly white hair and a fisherman’s cap and looked like he’d been sleeping rough. He looked right at me and said, “Smile, Miss America!” At sixty-seven I was being catcalled.
In my heart I was pleased.
