Lucky by Alice Sebold Page A

referring to my mother's acne scars. In response to the question, "Are there any more like you at home?" I said, "No, but there's my sister. She just flunked third grade."

    And so it went. My mouth only got bigger as time wore on, but I won't take all the blame.
    I was acutely aware of my audience; the adults loved it.
    Simply, the rules of revelation were too complicated for me to understand. My parents could say anything they wanted, but once outside our house, I was supposed to keep mum.
    "The neighbors like to pump you for information," my mother would say. "You have to learn to be more reticent. I don't know why you insist on talking to everyone."
    I didn't know what reticent meant. I was only following their example. If they wanted a quiet kid, I eventually told them during some screaming match in high school, maybe I should have taken up smoking. That way I would have lung cancer instead of what my mother accused me of having, which was cancer of the mouth.
    Sergeant Lorenz was the first person to hear my story. But he often interrupted with the words, "That's inconsequential." He probed my story for facts that would dovetail into the more salient charges. He was what he was: a "just-the-facts-ma'am" cop.
    Who could I tell these things to? I was at home. I didn't feel my sister could handle it and Mary Alice was miles away, working a job at the Jersey shore. It was not something I felt I could do over the phone lines. I tried to tell my mother.
    I was privy to many things. Little asides from my mother, such as, "Your father doesn't know the meaning of affection," when I was eleven, or the discussions we had had during my grandfather's protracted illness and death. No events were hidden from me. That was a decision I think my mother made early, in direct response to her own mother. My grandmother is stoic and taciturn. In a crisis, her words of wisdom are old school: "If you don't think about it, it will go away." My mother, given her own life, knew this not to be true.
    So there was a precedent for our discussion. By the time I was eighteen, she had sat me down and detailed her alcoholism, its onset and aftermath. She believed that by sharing such things I might be able to avoid them or, if need be, recognize them when they occurred. By talking about them to her children, she was also acknowledging that they were real and that they had an effect on us too, that things like this shaped a family, not just the person they happened to.
    My memory says it may have been nighttime, I can't be certain, but it was a few weeks after the rape and it was at the kitchen table. If my mother and I were not alone in the house, then certainly my father was in his study and my sister in her room, so we could have heard approaching footsteps if there were any.
    "I need to tell you what happened in the tunnel," I said.

    Place mats were still on the table from dinner. My mother fidgeted with the corner of hers.
    "You can try," she said, "but I can't promise I can do this."
    I began. I told her about Ken Childs's house, about taking pictures in his apartment. I got onto the path in the park. I told her about the rapist's hands, how he grabbed me with both arms, about the fighting on the bricks. When I got into the tunnel, started taking off my clothes, when he touched me, she had to stop.
    "I can't, Alice," she said. "I want to, but I can't."
    "It helps me to try and talk about it, Mom," I said.
    "I understand that, but I don't think I'm the one to do it with."
    "I don't have anyone else," I said.
    "I can make you an appointment with Dr. Graham."
    Dr. Graham was my mother's psychiatrist. In reality, she was' the family psychiatrist. She had begun as my sister's psychiatrist, and then wanted to see us as a family so she could see how the family dynamic affected my sister. My mother had even sent me to Dr.
    Graham a few times after a particularly bad spill down the spiral staircase. I was always running up or down it in sock feet and often