Exposed

When you aren't held by the one you need

When I was thirteen years old, I was sexually assaulted halfway up the stairwell of a building on Broadway between 82nd and 83rd. At the top of this stairwell lived the studios of the New York City Ballet, which is where you would find me almost every day after school, and both weekend mornings. I’d started studying there after my first ballet teacher retired. He was a very intense Russian man everyone called Maestro Celli. It was widely known that he’d danced with Pavlova in his prime, and that he was a "big deal." He only had two students under sixteen, me and a girl called Dionne. He was strict but kind, the way the greatest teachers are. He demanded the best out of you, but he beamed with pride and celebrated your wins like they were his own. I loved him. He was old by the time I came along, and he used a cane to heft himself from the chair where he sat keeping count while I danced, to walk over to me to instruct when needed.

When he retired, he told my parents I should go study at New York City Ballet, which happened to be just a few blocks from my mom’s apartment, and not too far from my dad’s. It was walkable from either home, and had incredible teachers and dancers. This particular afternoon was no different than any other. I came home from school, and said hi to my mom. My brother was almost two at this point, and napping. It was nice to find my mom at home when I got there - it hadn’t been like that for so many years. It still felt new because she’d worked full-time until my brother was born. Having her around felt exciting and special. I dropped my backpack in my room, put on my tights and leotard, grabbed my pointe shoes and ran out the door for class. 

It was cold, and I had sweatpants on over my tights and a light down jacket over my leotard. The jacket was two shades of purple, light and dark in a wide cross-hatch pattern, and I was at that age where that seemed enormously cool to me. (It wasn’t, I’ve seen pictures.) This was the year I’d get braces, but not my period. That didn’t happen until I was fourteen. This was the year I had pink horses painted around the frame of the door to my room, the year I still thought unicorns were magical and probably (hopefully) real, the year I still just wanted to hang out with my best friend forever and couldn’t imagine kissing a boy. My happiest times were dancing, being at school, and babysitting my brother. Sometimes after he’d go to sleep I’d put on one of my mom’s most glamorous dresses, experiment with her makeup and sing along to Donna Summer with a mic-hairbrush in the mirror. I didn’t know yet that I have a terrible singing voice, or if I knew, I didn’t care. 

I did know that you had to stay alert on the street. I knew that some men did things that were very hard to understand. Once, when I was in third grade, we went to Central Park during art class. The teacher told us to stay where she could see us, but to go find a tree to sketch. My best friend and I went together. We found what we thought was the most beautiful tree in the whole park, sat down with our pads and colored pencils and began. We’d look up, then down to draw … up, then down to draw. We’d only been sketching about ten minutes when we looked up to find a man with his pants down and his penis in his hand, masturbating and standing in front of our tree, looking at us and laughing maniacally. We ran to find the teacher. I don’t recall our school, my parents, or anyone else doing much about it. I’m sure someone asked us if we were okay, but no big deal was made of it. 

Another man had done something similar on a public bus when I was eleven, a business man (or at least he was wearing a trench coat and had a briefcase between his feet), but he was much more careful about it. I looked up, we made eye contact, and he looked down at something in his lap, so I looked, too. His penis was sticking out of his pants and when I looked back at him he smiled at me in a way that made me feel sick. I looked away, shocked and embarrassed to have been made a part of something I didn’t want or ask for, but I didn’t say anything to anyone. I wasn’t sure I was even allowed to say the word penis, and I certainly wasn’t going to say it to a stranger. I had been taking the public bus by myself since I was eight, this wasn’t unusual at the time, lots of my friends took the bus. I packed my own lunch for school. I was a latchkey kid, not afraid to be home alone, not afraid to run to the corner to get milk from the Korean Market. 

When I walked the streets of New York City, I paid attention, no one had to tell me. So I heard the traffic and horns, saw all the people bustling by, took in the storefronts I knew without needing to look, and saw the man veering toward the door of the ballet studio. I’d seen him look at me, but it was just a glance, just enough to notice, I suppose, that I was veering toward the doorway. He got there first, threw the door open, and started up the stairs. When I entered the vestibule, I felt uncomfortable. Something seemed a little off - he was going up the stairs, but too slowly, so I thought my best bet was to pass him as fast as I could. Surely I'm being silly. He's on his way somewhere, he arrived first. I thought, I’ll just speed on by and I’ll be in the studio in 30 seconds. So I started running up the stairs, and the second I passed him, he was behind me, fast and strong. He grabbed me around the waist with his right arm, and put his left hand over my mouth, tightly. He pulled me right up against his body, and I froze. My heart was pounding so intensely and my brain was trying to understand what was happening. I felt the way a wild animal must feel, trapped and all instinct, I couldn’t make any thoughts happen. I felt something hard pushing into the back of my leg, and then right in my ear he said quietly, “Just don’t move, okay?”

 I think that’s what did it. I think it was the question. It woke up my brain, it got the thoughts started again. He asked as if I had a choice, just don’t move, okay? just don’t move, okay? and it made me realize I had a choice and so I bit his hand, I bit it as hard as I could and at the same time I threw my left arm out and elbowed him in the ribs as hard as I could. He let go of me instantly, and I spun around, screaming NO wildly, and started climbing up the stairs backwards, like some kind of crab because I was not going to turn my back on him again.

And here is a thing, here is the thing that caught me off guard the most: I was more terrified than I had ever been in my life, but he also looked terrified. This person who had grabbed me and scared me and forced himself on me, who seconds before had seemed like the most terrifying thing I’d ever known, looked scared himself. Looked shocked. I kept desperately crawling-running up the stairs backwards and away from him, crying and yelling no, no, no, and after a few seconds that felt like hours, long enough for me to see that he was wiry, that his eyes and hair were brown, that he was wearing a sweatsuit, that he looked like a grownup, but not old, maybe someone in his twenties, he turned and fled down the stairs, and only when I saw the door close did I turn around and stand up to run up the last of the stairs and burst through the doors into the safety of the studio, where three of the dancers who also sometimes worked the desk looked at me in shock, and I couldn’t say anything except “a man” and point, but it was enough.

The two male dancers took off and the female dancer came around the desk and wrapped her arms around me and guided me into a chair and sat down right next to me and rocked me back and forth and said, “you’re okay, you’re okay, you’re safe” like she understood exactly what I’d been through, like I didn’t have to say a word. The two male dancers came back after about ten minutes and said they’d tried, they’d both run in different directions looking for any other man running, but there wasn’t anyone, or if there was, he’d gotten too far of a head-start. One of them brought my bag with him, I’d left it in the stairwell. The female dancer said she’d call my mom to tell her what happened so she could come get me, but I didn’t want her to move away from me, and she understood, so the dancer who’d brought my bag to me made the call.

I heard him explaining to my mom that a man had grabbed me in the stairwell. I heard him tell her about his hand over my mouth and the rest of it, and how I’d managed to get away but they hadn’t been able to catch him. I heard him ask if she wanted to come and get me, and then I heard oh, okay, oh, I see, and then he cupped the phone and said very kindly, “Your mom can’t come and get you, but I can walk you home, or you can stay and take class if you feel up to it. What would you like to do?” The dancers exchanged glances, as if maybe it seemed odd to them that my mother wasn’t coming to get me. I thought my brother was probably still napping and she didn’t want to wake him. I sat there for a minute, adrenaline still coursing through me.

If I went home, I felt pretty sure my mom would not put her arms around me the way the dancer had. She wouldn’t tell me I was okay now, I was safe. That just wasn’t her. I realized it would probably be more comforting for me to stay and try to take class, so that’s what I said. He told my mom and they got off the phone. The dancers seemed impressed that I was going to stay, like it was a little bit heroic of me, and that felt nice. I don’t remember much of the class, but I remember staying with it. I remember being in a bit of shock. I remember one of the male dancers walking me home, all the way to the apartment door, and I remember my mother thanking him. My brother was awake and he came toddling toward me, and that felt good. My mom asked me if I was okay, but it wasn’t asked as though anything very serious had happened. We didn’t talk about it much, she just said, “Some men are just animals,” and shook her head and that was it.

I can’t ask her about it now, and if she were alive, this would be the kind of conversation she wouldn’t want to have. I can’t talk to her about why she didn’t wake my brother and bring him with her to the studio so she could hold onto me and tell me I was okay. I don’t know why or how she could have done anything but that. I do know that sometimes my mother just couldn’t handle the horrible things. She was a fighter, and she’d been through a lot of trauma in her own life, and maybe the coping mechanisms she developed to survive those losses and shocks just didn’t serve her well in moments like that. She loved me but she couldn’t always show it. So I walked away from the experience feeling like she was sort of throwing me to the wolves. Some men are just animals. Like there wasn’t anything she or I could do about that, it was just the way things were. 

Maybe that’s how she felt, like there was nothing she could do to protect me, so there wasn’t much point in talking about it. My mother always liked for there to be a point, she liked things to make sense and be tidy. You can fluff all the couch pillows you want, but it won’t fix everything, it won’t make everything okay. It won’t explain the unexpected, incongruous moment of a man, grabbing a thirteen-year-old in a stairwell but also experiencing some kind of terror and horror himself. Horror at his own illness, the way he’d scared the life out of a kid who was now back-crawling up the stairs away from him yelling no like her life depended on it. I wish my mother had known she didn’t need to make everything better for me, that just being there would have been enough. I wish she’d known. 

If you’d like to meet me in real time for a talk about the pitfalls of trying to make sense of the world on your own as a kid, and also what it means to attempt radical empathy as an adult, I’ll be here on Friday 9/8/23 at 11:15am PST, or you can wait for the Come As You Are Podcast version. If you’d like to meet me out in the world, I’d love that so much. Here are two upcoming possibilities. (Registration for Joshua Tree closes September 30th!)