Lucky by Alice Sebold Page B

would slip on the polished wood. Each time, I did a sort of bouncing pratfall until I reached the landing or my limbs tangled into a configuration that stopped my body just short of the flagstone floor in the front hall. My mother decided this clumsiness might be part of a desire to self-destruct. I was certain it was nothing so sophisticated. I was a klutz.
    Now I had a real reason to see a psychiatrist. In the past, I prided myself on being the only member of the family who hadn't had therapy—I did not count a discussion of my pratfalls as therapy—and had tortured my sister while she was under Dr. Graham's care.
    Mary entered therapy the same year the Talking Heads came out with the perfect song for her little sister to use against her: "Psycho Killer." Sibling brutality with a melody. We had to scrimp to pay for her therapy. I reasoned that what my parents spent on her, they should spend on me. It wasn't my fault Mary was crazy.
    Turnabout is fair play, but Mary didn't tease me that summer. I told her that Mom thought I should go to Dr. Graham and we both agreed it might be good for me. My motivation was largely aesthetic. I liked the way Dr. Graham looked. She was feminist in the flesh.
    She was just under six feet tall, wore large batik muumuus on her dominant, but not heavy, frame, and she refused to shave her legs. She had laughed at my jokes in high school, and after our few sessions regarding my pratfalls, she had said to my mother, in my presence, that coming from the family I came from, I was incredibly well adjusted.
    Nothing, she had said at the time, was wrong with me.

    My mother drove me down to her office in Philadelphia. It was a different office than the one she had had at Children's Hospital; this was her private office. She was ready for me; I walked in and sat down on the couch.
    "Do you want to tell me why you've come to see me, Alice?" she asked. She knew already. My mother had told her on the phone when she called for the appointment.
    "I was raped in a park near my school."
    Dr. Graham knew our family. Knew both Mary and I were virgins.
    "Well," she said, "I guess this will make you less inhibited about sex now, huh?"
    I couldn't believe it. I don't remember whether I said, "That's a fucked-up thing to say."
    I'm sure I just wish I had. I do know that was the end of the session, that I got up and walked out.
    What Dr. Graham had said came from a feminist in her thirties. Someone, I thought, who should have known better. But I was learning that no one—females included—knew what to do with a rape victim.
    So I told a boy. His name was Steve Carbonaro. I knew him from high school. He was smart and my parents liked him—he appreciated their rugs and books. He came from a big Italian family and wanted out. Poetry was the way he chose to escape and, in this, I had more in common with him than I had with anyone else. On my parents' couch, at sixteen, we read to each other from The New Yorker Book of Poetry, and he had given me my first kiss.
    I still have my journal entry from that night. After he left, I recorded, "Mom was kinda smirking at me." I went to my sister's room. She had yet to be kissed by a boy. In my journal I wrote, "Yuck, ick, uck, make me sick. I told Mary that French kissing is gross and I didn't know why you were supposed to like it. I told her she could talk to me anytime she wanted to, if she thought it was gross too."
    In high school I was a reluctant partner for Steve Carbonaro. I would not go all the way.
    When he pressured me, I explained myself like this: I did not feel adamant about saying no, but I also didn't feel adamant about saying yes, so until I felt strongly one way or another, I'd stick with no.
    By seventeen, in our senior year, Steve had moved on to a girl who would, in the parlance of high school, "put out." At the senior prom, while I danced with Tom McAllister, Steve drank. When I ran into him and his girlfriend, she bitterly informed me that she was doing